El PODER de la MENTE - La INTELIGENCIA Documental

[Music] we observe the world to understand it and to be able to evolve intelligence has allowed us to forge tools to understand the small and the infinitely great for more than a century psychologists artist biologists and neuroscientists analyze dissection and half we have invented computers and walked on the moon but contrary to what we could believe our individual intelligence not today science explores the different facets of our intelligence but actually know the scientists who is intelligence [Music] intelligence is relating [Music] match different elements to find solutions to understand it, you have to divide it and isolate all its components researchers study its different facets to measure intelligence one of the first proposals has been to measure the speed at which the brain reacts this is the method that the teacher had louis has used and compared our time of reaction with that of our ancestors and the results of their study did not favor [Music] to measure reaction time we show a person a light on a screen and you’re pressing a button as fast as possible it should tell you if the light appears to the right or to the left is not a reflex act but a simple information that our brain must process these studies on reaction time are very old and many of they were carried out by francis galton cousin of charles darwin between 1860 and 1880 in great britain santón tested many thousands of people representative of the population At that time, people had a very fast reaction time. we have looked for comparable studies that would have been done in the past 120 years and we have found about 15 when comparing them we have already been able to verify that over the past 150 years people have become more and more slow for the teacher they had guys intelligence is speed in our brain it invests on average 50 milliseconds more than that of our great-grandparents when processing simple information fifty thousand and 50 milliseconds more may sound like a ridiculously short thing but if we think about the thousands and thousands of decisions that we must make every day and we are a little slower in each decision this can have consequences and very very important the teacher had wish is convinced that we are less intelligent than in the 19th century and the proof is in the incredible inventiveness of this period marked by an explosion of innovations in the creativity of ideas in the 19th century there were many fantastic innovations to food flavor and studies showing that the number of inventions per capita its perversion was four times greater than today the teacher had wish thinks that our intelligence is in decline for at least 150 years but in the 19th century being francis galton I thought that the English were much less intelligent than the ancient Greeks where brilliant minds were not lacking then and the predecessors of the Greeks prehistoric men is extremely difficult to measure your intelligence however at the max planck institute in leipzig they try to answer this question rebuilding the brain of our ancestors from prehistory [Music] paleo neurology is a very science very frustrating because your study object is almost non-existent there is no fossil brains what we do have is the box that contained in this brain [Music] By comparing our brains with that of prehistoric man, scientists have found differences not only in shape but also in size some of these individuals had a bigger brain than ours [Music] knowing that everything we are everything we think our memories the personality emotions language everything depends on this organ then it is that intelligence is related to size and it would be absurd to think that it is not there is a relationship between brain size and complexity of behaviors that is to say the intelligence we see this in the animal kingdom the animals called smarter particularly cetaceans and some types of dolphins by example they have very large brains with large numbers of neurons and so so much we find in them something that we also find in the great primates and in hunger evolution grew the size of our brain by 2 million years until it reached its maximum some 15 thousand years ago the man from chromagnon who painted in the cave of lascaux some 17,000 years ago he was a homo sapiens like us but of all homo sapiens this was the one with the largest brain the Our brain size has decreased compared to the sad ancestor and according to some researchers we are less intelligent than him but this theory is not shared by all I don’t think there is an intelligence that can be measured with a ruler and say that our recent ancestor was equally or more or less intelligent the man of Cromagnon had the intelligence he needed to survive in his world but not to work in a bank if you travel the 25,000 years ago on our time machine to bring the present to the man of chromagnon would certainly adapt to the world in which he will have to live goya I say this Y Y smarter less smart when we try to measure intelligence everything complicates and yet we do it continuously in the universities of the whole world it is taught what is intelligence and all without being specialists we measure it every day and one we all measure the intelligence to someone the most important thing after the physical is intelligence and we measure people’s intelligence always if we talk about a concept difficult or we do something unknown how long it takes for jared to understand and measure intelligence by analyzing responses [Music] evaluating the relevance of the actions comparing individuals a method that resulted in the only tool we have to measure intelligence the quotient intellectual invented by alfred binet in the early 20th century valfré came a long time ago criticized the minister’s alienists to the psychiatrists of the time who made diagnoses to judge disability intellectual separating the idiots who had the highest degree of disability after imbeciles and then fools he cited them in binner’s opinion his judgments were debatable very diffuse and different from one psychiatrist to another who thought that some objective criteria and a single assessment tool based on scientific criteria in 1905 the french ministry of education asked binner to find the way to detect children with school difficulties he had no no theory about intelligence but looking at her daughters she thought that could make an assessment based on reasoning the ability to understand and the memory what I finally try to do is find for each group of age the characteristic problems of that group for example showed them a photo and asked them what it represented noted that the 3 year olds listed what was in the picture there a man or woman a bank a tree that those of seven or eight years old wrote the picture there is a man and a woman sitting on a bench and finally in the 12 years old they interpreted the image is so sad or the Lord is sick and things like that so I came along with theodore simón, the first intelligence test the classic mental age test was born is the relationship between the mental age given by the test result and the actual age of the person the figure is multiplied by 100 to get the IQ if a 10 year old solves the tests 1 of 12 will be an advanced child and will have a quotient of 120 [Music] and the idea was to relate the performance of an individual with that of other comparable individuals that is those who are in exactly the same age group the same culture etc and obviously starting from a series of test scores for an age determined or IQ is the position of an individual compared with the performance of others who are like him or her the same age and we give the IQ an exaggerated power because he tries to measure a quality as particular as intelligence it’s hard to resist the temptation to measure yourself to compare yourself what is a bit ridiculous is what we are currently on the internet like the web pages that our IQ calculates people make the test so it meets a figure and then interprets it and if for example this figure is not good we think we are not smart it is absolutely catastrophic on 2 it is ridiculous to think that a number defines a person 4 or 3 only a psychologist will do a reliable test of the IQ of 2 since we must know how to interpret it in relation to the individual’s past his present in 2 and 3 and his personality [Music] this quotient measures intelligence compare people but it allows us to know if our intelligence has evolved since I came and invented it more than a century ago we get better test results today [Music] in New Zealand is where for the first have you ever answered this question there james flynn has made a surprising discovery that scientists around the world have dubbed the flynn effect the cold effect supposes the discovery that all the nations that entered in the industrial era they have obtained considerable improvements in the IQ I’ve reviewed the entire range of these tests in 40 countries as in france, holland or norway where young people had been called to military service has been given exactly the same test and improvements each year are very evident a generation or two ago people got an average of 30 responses out of 60 today get 45 after evaluating dozens and dozens of studies James Flynn has shown that for over 60 years we have been getting better results in these tests does this mean that we are now more smarter than our grandparents a change in IQ does not necessarily mean a change in intelligence let’s take an example of a person towards today the test for the first time lung if you do the same test the next day there is an effect of learning and your score will be higher but it does not mean that you have made smarter just means you are familiar with the easy text test the increase in IQ is largely due to the better environment food and better education our quotient would increase from 2 to 3 points for each school year and years of schooling have gone from one average from 6 to the beginning of the 20th century to the 11 years of today in the countries industrialized all these added changes have increased the results when we perform a test today we are prepared to the extent that schooling and a number of other factors have given us the ability to apply our logic abstractly is to say that we can see a series of numbers and hitting the next [Music] i [Music] in terms of intelligence there is no Relying on appearances having better results in these tests does not imply that let’s be smarter it’s just that we’re better prepared to pass the test our intelligence is like a muscle that we train to get its full potential and with training we can reach our limits the figures show this after decades of improvement in test results have peaked they’re even getting worse in countries like england denmark or norway increasing IQ is a phenomenon that has lasted a century but all countries will end up arriving at the top of this increase I do not suspect that formal education has abused the ability to manipulate abstract concepts and unless there is a pedagogy revolution the benefits school has produced to hit the roof since nowadays almost everyone is in school an outstanding ratio slower and smaller brains where it’s at our intelligence [Music] and the first tools to measure intelligence were invented more of a century and we are still influenced by theories of being francis galton and alfred binet but today we can go further instead of measuring what intelligence produces let’s put our attention on the organ that produces intelligence [Music] richard haier is a psychologist and neuroscientist at irvine university from california for over 30 years tries find out what an intelligent brain looks like thanks to the progress of observation instruments yesterday and his colleague professor rex hyung investigate where in the brain does intelligence stay let’s look at the brain of richard haier we see a nice brain doctor hai you are a brilliant person and smart and we see all the regions that support your intelligence does not exist in any area in the brain that we can call the intelligence it was thought that there was an intelligence center in the frontal but research has shown that when we solve intelligence problems inside a scanner communication bidirectional between the front and the back is very important while we carry out the operation professor haier is one of the pioneers in the use of modern neuroimaging techniques his first study dates from 1988 until then no one had used these tools to investigate intelligence We have found areas of the brain that are activated when we test intelligence but the most surprising thing was that the more active they were these less good areas were the results of such tests this is what contrary to what we expected in the world of science to find a opposite result than expected is really interesting an intelligent brain is not a brain that works more but the opposite it’s a brain that works less this is what we call neuro efficacy being smart is to solve a problem with minimal effort if we remember the first time we drove a car the first day in a large empty parking lot with someone sitting next to us turning to steering wheel and thinking now I have to brake however today we drove in amid the traffic of an unknown city and still we can chat with the companions because our brain is now much more effective so both a high level of intelligence is not necessarily linked to a brain that works more if not a more efficient transmission of information between important areas of the brain when you think of a process as complex as intelligence we must imagine that the brain is like an orchestra with different sections but the real mystery is in how these interact sections because as we know this orchestra does not have a conductor if the brain is an orchestra then intelligence is music when we start to interpret the score we never know how they are going to play together the musicians [Music] at the sorbonne university the professor or liviu is looking for a director for this orchestra to find it measures activity brain power as kids solve problems [Music] what interests him is what he himself called intelligence bucks we show a child a picture 1 2 3 4 5 for separate bars five bars together and we ask if there is the same number of bars at the top and at the bottom look for up to seven u eight years all the children in the world would respond there is higher because the image is longer children’s brains are easily fooled by the spatial vice intelligence according to which the length equals this means that we have different neural pathways to solve the same task mental [Music] or measure there are many solutions to the same problem and our brain is continually struggling to inhibit negative strategies what we want to show and this is the originality of our laboratory is that inhibition is undoubtedly the key and positive process of intelligence because it allows us to resist ourselves to resist ourselves is to learn to control interference that disturb our intelligence the stroop test is one of the methods of observation of these interferences consists of saying the color of a word without reading matos yellow a red yellow green is red green green red green yellow xunta yellows red yellows yellow red xunta yellow and red are yellow yellow red green red yellow blue green no [Music] to solve a problem we use different brain regions linked together but sometimes entering competition but how do the different communicate regions this topic is of interest to the teacher Douglas Fields of the Washington National Institute of Health [Music] the brain is made of two kinds of tissues white matter and gray matter we have all heard of gray matter which is where the neurons on the surface of the brain but underneath are thousands of connections axon cables connecting neurons forming circuits and it’s white because these axons are isolated by a cell membrane called myelin myelin wraps around axons and allows information to circulate freely fast and effective in the brain when a child is born his brain is not mature his functions are minimal a baby can do almost nothing cannot feed his vision is very limited no can walk or hold his head, this is because our brain is being permanently shaped by the environment some of the most interesting things about myelin is that they form After birth and myelin is essential for the information to circulate efficiently through the brain is essential for our intelligence but currently the formation of myelin is altered barbra de am next endocrinologist at the museum of natural history of paris studies how our intelligence is threatened by one of the scourges of the 21st century pollution anywhere in the world where you live you will be exposed to certain chemicals that interfere with the operation of thyroid hormone this is the hormone produced by the thyroid gland that is at the base of the neck and is necessary for brain development from the first stages of the fetus to a more advanced age like mine to ensure the maintenance of mental functions including myelination the european food safety authority has analyzed 297 pesticides among them more than 100 affect the functioning of thyroid hormone like bisphenol-a pcb and flame retardant chemicals with whom we are in daily contact the barbra time next team has shown that these products block specific hormone receptors thyroid from each of the brain cells and the effects are considerable there is solid evidence scientists we have observed levels of exposure in mothers have compared different levels of exposure and we have seen that the levels higher were associated with a loss of 5 to 6 ratio points intellectual in their children the truth is that most of us we do not perceive the difference but it is evident that 5 points less than quotient intellectuals can make a big difference in school success or to success in life and knowing it can be very worrying for parents our intelligence has allowed us to create a complex world but at the cost of degrade the environment and we could be paying the price if this degradation affects our brain acting for example on myelin but if this phenomenon is confirmed we will do For more than a century we have thought that mental processes were due only to the electrical activity of neurons but today neurologists have begun to explore new fields only 15 of the brain cells are neurons the rest of the 85% are not they communicate using electrical impulses we call them and again methods have allowed us to see to our surprise that glial cells communicate with each other and with neurons without electricity this is a fascinating starting point because it represents a fundamental change of concepts regarding brain function at the cellular level glial cells cells much more numerous than neurons and that form some make myelin others they feed and protect the neurons are called astrocytes and a unexpected discovery indicates that astrocytes play a role in intelligence it all started with a genius in april 1955 at the princeton the new jersey hospital the pathologist thomas hardy conducted the autopsy on albert einstein on April 18 at 8 in the morning he decided to steal the man’s brain regarded as the embodiment of genius he intended to examine this precious organ to find the secret of intelligence after hiding it in his house for 27 years he authorized other scientists to examine it these discovered in einstein’s brain what could be the secret of his intelligence [Music] open the brain of albert einstein was examined to see what it was that it got smarter and they couldn’t find any difference in the number of neurons nor in size there was nothing except that his brain had more astrocytes this drew the attention of many people to the role of astrocytes in intelligence the glial cells identified astrocytes does more of a century although in recent years scientists have understood that their function wasn’t much more complex than I imagined astrocytes do many things control synapses control the blood flow in the brain feed neurons react to wounds all of these things were considered lesser tasks than astrocytes were doing in the brain and hadn’t been taken very seriously until account of the determinants that are the astrocytes for the neurons a little human control hundreds of neurons many more than for example some piece of mouse based on this observation a team from the university of rochester has done a fascinating experiment to better understand human intelligence have decided to cross the barrier of species [Music] and have transplanted human astrocytes into the brain of a mouse we have transplanted human astrocytes into mice and the transplant invaded literally his whole brain when we checked him a month later We could see that where we had made the graft it occupied a inconspicuous place a year later the entire brain had grafted itself and all of his cells had literally been replaced by cells human and we realized that these mice had more memory and more capacity to learning that the ungrafted [Music] to check the capabilities of the brain-modified mice the they got into a maze result the grafted found the exit twice faster than the non grafted this experiment leaves no room for doubt astrocytes favor memory and learning play a key role in our intelligence [Music] intelligence is reflected in the brain function but as explained the difference between intelligences of our colleagues friends or parents is that it has more white matter fewer astrocytes or their neurons are faster the origin of our capabilities lies in part in our genes Robert Blooming studies behavioral genetics in his research has I have seen thousands of children grow and thanks to this I hope to find the genes influencing type intelligence often people want to know where extent intelligence is determined by genes first of all you have to insist that the word determine is not adequate we must say influence already which, as with size, is closely related to genes but not determined by them if we are tall our children are likely are higher than average but if they are poorly fed or sick they will be lower this is not determining is influencing other words the genes give us the potential and the environment decides the final score to understand the complex relationships between genes and intelligence robert blooming has performed thousands of tests on twins identical twins have the distinction of being clones have exactly the same genes are completely identical same hair same eyes but have the same test results intelligence and the answer is yes their results are much more similar than those from other brothers this is the proof that without being completely determining genes play a crucial role mons most countries in the world more than 100 currently have twin records because they recognize the importance of the twin method in of calculating the influence of genes the next stage of our research is to find the genes responsible for the intelligence for this robert blooming has used dna chips capable of detecting more than a million genetic markers comparing the DNA of those who had good results in the blooming tests wanted to know if certain genes occur more frequently but the precise identification of these genes is much more complicated than expected [Music] 15 years ago when I started looking for the genes of intelligence nobody imagined it would be such a difficult task and we were able to identify over 300 genes that influence intelligence the problem was that we had studied only 1% interface [Music] intelligence is influenced by the interaction of many thousands of genes that they form an incredibly complex network and also produce effects different depending on the region of the brain where they act [Music] before we thought that the brain it worked by areas this area controls the language is it does something else the corpus callosum communicates the hemispheres today we have realized that this it was fiction and that the brain acts more globally from a point of view genetics is even clearer since most of the genes that act on the brain act on many regions of the brain step by step we understand our intelligence, scientists at the end of the tools to measure it but the question is how we are going to use them intelligence is what best predicts our level of education or our job therefore speaking of intelligence is delicate since we tend to value classify and rank with the risk of making mistakes and the reasoning error is in considering that intelligence can be essentially hereditary and this has led us to ramblings in my opinion totally and absolutely ridiculous for example in 1924 I think a law was restricted in the US that restricted immigration through quotas because the tests were already less good results and immigrants were supposed to be hereditary less intelligent and their entry into the country was therefore limited to avoid a decrease in the average as we know they entered through ellis island and in front of new york where many of them were returned, especially those who anticipated to the rise of nazism funky cea nothing hénin there I think especially in the Eastern European Jews who were expelled for absolutely stupid reasons solid Indians for a long time we believed that our origin was decisive and that our inheritance controlled our lives afterwards luckily science has abandoned this deterministic view but intelligence is something special a subject so sensitive that missteps have marked their history williams or physical or visionary click and Nobel Prize for his discovery of the transistor was less brilliant in his studies on intelligence [Music] in his belief in the power of inta plastic d this version of directly from huancané health alt in general and dear velotti in 1974 practically yesterday a time not far away some used IQ to justify their racism and exclude the different joseph escoba next suffers from asperger syndrome a compatible form of autism with a high quotient graduate in political science doctor in philosophy and writer with six years did not speak a word today speaks seven languages ​​including Hebrew Arabic Persian and Azeri and I was part of those children whose destination was trash for a long time told us that autistic people were intellectually handicapped and autism became almost synonymous with intellectual disability however today we know that this is not so every human society needs a hierarchy it needs people to mark the difference and we tend to summarize everything under a single criterion in the us human quality and hierarchies are defined by IQ in france can be any administrative competition in imperial china were the famous mandarin exams but all this rests on an idea however erroneous that there is a single scale to measure intelligence of humanity and everyone who preaches these theories places himself in what highest and intelligence as a single scale of humanity but you can define the human from a single dimension we can be defined only by intelligence when it it has so many different facets [Music] ah we have not always been told that mozart had a symphony in mind whole when we listen to a symphony we must follow it as it develops in time however he saw it in its entirety now it becomes the kind of mental complexity of a mathematician when you have seven or eight formulas in mind and know all the connections possible among them yes but we can always argue intelligence musical is intelligence no matter what matters is that it exists and that those who own it don’t necessarily have an IQ [Music] There has always been a reluctance to consider that there are different ways intelligence and a certain tendency to want to determine a quotient general intellectual a single intelligence scale where we can situate ourselves by above or below but reality does not contradict me font there are numerous forms of intelligence and we can have a very high level in some of them ef ac and a low level in others this idea was in the first studies on intelligence today the scientists have already accepted that whatever method is used they will not get to measure intelligence with a single scale at the university in new mexico professor rex jong is convinced that to solve any type of problem we use different types of reasoning and what we call intelligence is but one of them I think creativity is another model of how the brain works and what tried to figure out that’s different from intelligence or the like we’re talking the same or something different and has concluded that the creativity is a basically different reasoning process [Music] and reading a score is being smart using our knowledge [Music] improvising is being smart inventing and being creative [Music] a musician can be both smart and creative an ideal study subject [Music] Professor Young has studied numerous brains to know how intelligence and creativity can coexist work on the hypothesis that they are complementary and that there are two networks different in the brain that cooperate to allow us to reason one is a type of intelligent reasoning and the other a type of creative reasoning and both are extremely important we are very close to understanding how they work our theory is that the intelligence network is located above all in the brain surface with creativity things are different because it mainly depends on the default network call located inside the brain these two networks exchange permanently web information so that we can resolve the problems posed by the world in which we live sixth we’ve all experienced that feeling of an idea that comes from you don’t know where with the force of evidence what neuroscientists reveal to us is that the creative inventive reasoning way is a unique way of reasoning we can be smart without being creative or creative without being smart this question makes sense to evolve intelligently not we need all the resources of our mind we cannot be creative for example in physics if we only have training in physics to be creative in physics we need to be educated in that strange universe and be able to use and reuse the mental mechanisms that we have learned in other contexts the problem of sterile investigations is that they lock themselves in their bubble and do not give or receive information or conversely people creative are those that import ideas from a universe and the threads are woven the box is completed scientists gradually assemble the different pieces of our intelligence but the world evolves and intelligence also the brain is constantly evolving and allows intelligence to adapt to the problems that we must solve by multiple and varied that this is When I was a child I knew that I didn’t work like the others and I was aware of this this made me reflect and led me to imagine a plural world where there was not a single way to classify and measure but many what I mean is that true human intelligence is not about thinking about plural form and knowing how to take into account different ways of understanding the world not just one [Music] the role of science should not be to say whether we are more or less intelligent that our neighbors or that our ancestors but that of helping us understand how our brain works so we will know how to take care of our intelligence and also improve it to weave connecting threads between us and the diversity that surrounds us [Music] .