Science & Self-improvement

One cannot but wonder if the brains of geniuses are somewhat different from that of us ordinary people. Obviously this is a difficult question to answer by several reasons: people are not usually prone to leave their brains for scientific study, many geniuses were dead before neurological studies were initiated, etc. There is, however, one outstanding case in which such a brain could be studied: the brain of Albert Einstein.

When Einstein died in 1955, he was universally recognized as one of the greatest geniuses that humanity had had. At that time, he was working at the University of Princeton. The then pathologist at the Princeton hospital was Dr. Thomas Harvey, who stole the brain and lost his job as a result. In 1995 Dr. Harvey sent a fax to a neuroscientist, offering her the possibility of study Einstein’s brain. The offer was of course readily accepted.

Harvey had rejected most of the requests for Einstein’s brain that he received from neuroscientists. The scientist that Harvey had chosen in this case to give an opportunity was Dr. Sandra Witelson, who works at the School of Medicine of McMaster University in Canada. There, Dr. Witelson has a collection of 125 brains, all of Canadian people, that she keeps in a walk-in refrigerator. By analyzing the weight, the volume, and the proportions of her specimens, Witelson investigates the relationship between brain structure and cognition, which has been the subject of her research for thirty years.

Witelson’s study of Einstein’s brain in 1999 revealed some features that had been overlooked by other researchers: the parietal lobe was fifteen percent larger than average, and it was a single compartment instead of the usual two ones. Histological studies of Einstein’s brain are underway, in order to determine features such as the packing density of his neurons.

Witelson has also for study the brain of the mathematician Dr. Donald Coxeter, a distinguished geometer that died at 96 and that remained intellectually active almost to the end of his life. A vegetarian who rarely drank alcohol, and preserved physical fitness, Coxeter had the brain of a much younger person, says Witelson. In his case, as in Einstein’s, the parietal lobe was larger than normal.

While many studies have been done about damaged brains, the brains in Witelson’s collection are of normal people without brain damage. The brain bank was initiated as part of a study to find why language capacity is located in the left hemisphere of the majority of people. People of all kinds that where to die as a result of cancer were sought to be donors, and extensive testing was carried on while they were still alive.

While her research has yet to answer many questions about lateralization of language capacity, interesting results on the differences between male and female brains have been shown. After a ten-year study, Witelson published findings showing that the packing density of neurons is 12 percent greater in the female brain than in the male brain in the region where the language capacity is located: the temporal lobe. A similar difference was found in the frontal lobes.

While these differences could be attributed to the known fact that female brains are generally smaller than male ones, Witelson says that it would be not correct to do so because the difference in packing appears only in some layers of the cortex. These layers are the important ones in processing information input. The question to answer now, says she, is if the processing of speech sounds could be related to the anatomy of the brain.

There are many things that differentiate an intelligent person from an ordinary person, and they all make that the intelligent person feels like being a strange to other people. One important feature of an intelligent person is that he thinks before acting while an ordinary person usually does the contrary. One effect of thinking is to be able to predict things before they happen, and this will be sometimes regarded unfavorably by certain people.

The prophet is historically an unwelcome figure and this is easily comprehended. When everybody is thinking that it will be easy to do something and enjoying beforehand the benefits that they will reap, the prophet keeps announcing all the aspects that can go wrong. It is not a surprise that his words are not well received.

Acting according to reason is not always the best recipe to become a popular fellow. This is just so because most people do not act motivated by reason; they act motivated by many emotions that are well know by publicists. We can say that the motives behind human beings’ acts are mostly instinctive. If you attempt to make people act because of reasons, you are going against human nature and your attempts will be resisted.

I once read an inspiring analogy that was not really intended to be presented in a discussion about reason and instinct, but illustrated which should be the behavior of a leader. It goes on saying that people are like a piece of string. If you pull it you may take it wherever you want, but if you push it that work will be very much difficult.

This analogy can be adapted to our subject by saying that when you pull people by their instincts you can take them wherever you want, but if want to push them by the force of reasoning you will have a hard job to make them move. Publicists and any kind of people trying to sell something know this too well. They know, for example, that it is very much easy to sell a car by saying that you will be envied for having it than by saying that it will lower your spending in gasoline.

Another characteristic of intelligent people is what we can call their sense of justice and that has to do with morals. Most people are moral in the sense that they can distinguish between right and wrong and most of the times act rightly rather than wrongly. However, this behavior is not self-induced but coerced by society. Most people do no act rightly because they have an inner urge to do so, but because they fear the consequences of not doing so. The contrary is true with intelligent people. This point will be best illustrated with an anecdote from Abraham Lincoln that J. G. Holland tells us that happened when Lincoln was a clerk in a store.

“On one occasion he sold a woman a little bill of goods amounting in value, by the reckoning, to two dollars and six and a quarter cents. He received the money, and the woman went away. On adding the items of the bill again, to make himself sure of correctness, he found that he had taken six and a quarter cents too much. It was night, and closing and locking the store, he started out on foot, a distance of two or three miles, for the house of his defrauded customer, and delivering over to her the sum whose possession had so much troubled him, went home satisfied.”

Scientific knowledge is acquired by means of the scientific method. When one first meets this expression, one is likely to be deceived by its simplicity. “Scientific method” doesn’t look very impressive, and one may ask if there is much to talk about it. We are in the habit of hearing important things called by important names, and this name seems rather humble. However, this is the case where an important thing is disguised under a very common name.

Our present world would not be the same without the scientific method, as it is the base of science. It was fostered by two 17th-century movements called “rationalism” and “empiricism.” That century–when Galileo, Harvey, Newton, and Boyle were alive–beheld for the first time a departing from the idea that knowledge about the world should be received from an authority. The scientific method was discovered in this century, but there were disagreements as to how it should be applied.

Rationalism was a philosophical school that contended that fundamental knowledge is based on reason and that truth is found by the rational analysis of ideas independently of emotions or authoritative pronouncements. Rationalism can be symbolized in the figure of Rene Descartes who, in the Discourse on Method, asserted that all theoretical science should be like Euclidean geometry.

Empiricism, on the other hand, sustained that legitimate knowledge aroused from what is provided to the mind by the senses. Empiricist did not consider knowledge what is gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or mere reasoning. Empiricism can be symbolized by the figure of Francis Bacon, who in his work Novum Organum proposed that the laws of nature should be obtained by applying inductive reasoning to observed facts.

According with current views, neither of these two positions is entirely right, but both must be used according to the situation. Neither pure rationalism nor pure empiricism could have achieved what science has achieved. Wrong results can be obtained applying any of the two methods. The best result is when each method is used to control the other one, that is, when reason controls what is perceived by the senses, and what reason deduces is contrasted with experimental facts.

Deviations from this norm–the harmonic playing of reasoning and experience–can lead to disaster particularly in the social sciences: anthropology, psychology, and sociology. In these sciences the experimental work that is routinely carried out in the physical sciences is very difficult to perform for obvious reasons. Therefore, much of research is done by applying great quantities of reasoning to very few experimental facts. It comes as no surprise that theories abound and that some are later discredited. Most cannot be proved or disproved because the only way to do either thing is by means of experimental work that has not been done or cannot be done.

An outstanding case of a theory that was based mostly in the intuition (or reasoning) of its creator rather than in actual experimentation is psychoanalysis. The great pioneer work of Freud was based in clinical work carried out only by himself and in the deductions he made about what he observed in his patients. The scientific method as is now conceived-posing a hypothesis and proving or disproving it by experimentation-was completely absent in Freud’s research. Many of his results are nowadays forgotten, although the core of his theory still remains.

There are ways in which intelligent people differ from normal people that are essentially quantitative. However, when a quantitative difference is large enough it becomes a qualitative difference. An example is reasoning. “To reason” may mean “present reasons and arguments,” and also “think logically.” Both meanings are not the same, even if they seem so. I can present “reasons” that are not “reasonable,” so to speak. I may argument, but in a crooked manner that will lead no one to believe in the rightness of my arguments.

“To think logically,” on the other hand, seems to appeal more to our sense of what is right. One may expect, for instance, that something that is logically thought is something indisputable. Nevertheless, there is still a requisite that must be met for this to be true: my listener and I must agree in what is logical. If I think that B follows from A, the other person must agree with this. Once we both agree that A -> B (A implies B), then I may use this as a link in a chain of arguments.

What happens if we don’t agree in this very first step? Then, it can be said that we are applying different “logics.” In matters that do not belong to the realms of physicists and mathematicians, this can actually happen. When talking about psychological matters, it can happen that what is logical for a person is not logical for another person. We use to refer to this as different “ways of thinking,” but they can also be looked upon as logical chains of the type, “if you do this, then I do that.”

People are taught different ways of thinking by their parents and by their experiences. Of course, I am talking here of people of a same culture that have many common characteristics. People reared in different cultures may have diametrically opposed views of what is the world and what is life. But even within the same culture people may differ in these views. For instance, a person gets rich but doesn’t leave his friends and his neighborhood, while other thinks that getting rich means moving and acquiring new relationships.

The origin of moral is not clear and has been the subject of much debate. Most people in our Western Christian world think that if A is good with B, it would be immoral if B doesn’t behave in the same manner. These people would agree that if A is good with B, is “logical” that B be good with A. This is particularly true with intelligent people.

Intelligent people tend to be highly moral, although there are, of course, exceptions. They are also inclined, naturally, to think logically. They apply to social relationships the same kind of reasoning that would apply to a mathematical problem, but using as premises moral principles instead of mathematical axioms. They would consider as impossible that a moral principle is not followed as would be, for instance, that two plus two doesn’t make four.

It is not surprise, then, that intelligent people are easy prey for other less intelligent people that do not follow those moral principles and that think that they need not to be curtailed by rules that are only of interest for foolish people.