If you believe you have some sort of cognitive malady thwarting your advancement in the workplace or in an academic environment, listen up. I fancy a bit of neuroscience time and time again, something odd for a 16 year old boy to claim, I know. But I fancy learning about what makes us, us. I relish in learning about what makes us sad, what makes us so enthralled by the scoring of a touchdown by our favorite football team, what makes us able to remember what we had for breakfast this morning, what enables us to build thousand pound rocket ships and venture off to the moon — it’s all neuroscience, the brain and its willful manifestations of desires and ambitions. Or perhaps, the workings aren’t so paramount and vivacious. Maybe it’s watching the latest episode of Dance Moms, or texting that girl you met on the dance floor the other night — what made you hesitate to ask her out? What made you nervous? It’s your brain, my friend. I think we’re finally becoming aware of this 2.5 lb. gelatinous heap stored inside of our craniums with the myriad of news articles depicting every little and last advance in the principal field of neuroscience. It seems that every other day we’re learning a little more about how we work — how the brain works. And this is what I want to bring to everybody’s awareness: for the first time in history the general educated public is aware that the brain is the very center of their beings when before it just their personalities or souls. People now realize that it’s not people that are stupid; it’s their brains that are stupid. “You need to get your brain checked” and “What on earth is going on up there?” have now become commonplace utterances in academic and workplace settings among people who notice some sort of intellectual deficiency in their schoolmates or coworkers. In fact, with the advent of neural imaging techniques like MEG (Magnetoencephalography — read more here), we can see exactly what’s going on inside someone’s head from a scientific standpoint. The question becomes: If intelligence and cognition are the result of microscopic physiological mechanical happenings, are people really to blame for their deficiencies? Shouldn’t we then look at intelligence deficiencies as a medical problem and not an issue of someone’s personality?
If you’re slightly literate or if you have relatives over the age of 60, you should be somewhat aware of a little (synonymous with really flipping big, in this instance) something called Alzheimer’s Disease, the silent killer of over 500,000 people in the United States every year (http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/alzheimer-kills-previously-thought-study-article-1.1712078). Alzheimer’s is what we call a neurodegenerative disease, catalyzing the atrophy of synaptic connections in the brain. Whilst we know very little of the exact mechanics behind consciousness and the brain, it is known that these synaptic connections facilitate most neurological happenings, such as memory and basic thought along with multitude of other cognitive functions. Symptoms of Alzheimer’s cover the spectrum of just about any neurological or cognitive deficit, manifesting on MEG screens as little to very little neuron-activity at all. This results in the loss of memory, the impaired reasoning skills, the instances of delusion, and other plethora of syndrome. Now from a pure neurological standpoint, the images that are displayed on the MEG screen of an Alzheimer’s patient and a person of the typical “stupid” stereotype are not too far off in terms of resemblance, meaning that they both depict a lesser-than-average portrayal of neural synaptic happenings. I am not in any way entertaining the position that people with the unfortunate diagnosis are stupid; I am simply showing the correlation between a person of lesser intelligence without any medically diagnosed neurological calamity and a person that is cognitively handicapped.
If people that are in the position of less intelligence in comparison to their peers show decreased cortical activity in their MEG images and Alzheimer’s patients show similar but more drastic neural activity, are the people that are of less intelligence also in a neurological debacle? Both parties show similar symptoms of neurological impairments (in varying degrees of severity, of course) — based on this, form your own ultimatum.
Harvard University and Boston’s Children Hospital recently published a study — a study of greater than 12 years, mind you — that detailed the varying degrees of cognitive and neurological damage inflicted on the minds of Romanian orphan children that were in the horribly unfortunate position of never knowing adoption into loving, and supportive homes (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11370571/Loving-foster-homes-repaired-brain-damage-of-Romanian-orphans.html). The part of the brain that was affected by this ordeal appears to have been the “white matter”, or the part of neural matter that insulates the axon of the neuron, speeding up the inter-neuronal communication protocol by lessening the amount of electrical charge that is lost as it’s en route to the next neuron on the sequence of almost innumerable cells that give rise to consciousness. Symptoms generally manifested much later in life under the visage of subtle intellectual impairments and emotional dysfunction. Much like our brief analysis of Alzheimer’s disease yielded, the MEG scans of these children relayed a similar lack of neuronal activity, much like the people of less intelligence — again, varying in severity. Of course, children that knew the joys and assurances of adoption made full recovery in their neurological quality, just to make that clear. But this begs the question: if these Romanian children would be referred as “stupid” for the rest of their lives due to their neurological injuries — the same label belonging to people of apparent less intelligence — wouldn’t this assignment be considered a medical problem, since physiological and anatomical malformations account for the cognitive impairments?
And if these children’s symptoms are akin to the typical “stupid” fellow, wouldn’t both groups be under similar medical conditions but of less severity? If we are noting similar characteristics in typical unfortunately designated “stupid” people and known documented medical predicaments, we should classify both groups as having medically recognized neurological conditions since they both exhibit very similar symptoms. The parallels and congruences in their symptoms should point to this ultimatum.
Of course, the acknowledgement of this dogma in the assignment of mental disabilities to people that mal-perform in an academic setting or just possess the title “dim” or “stupid” evokes the controversy of blaming every little fault in one’s behavior or intelligence on the happenings inside of one’s brain and the neurological processes/mechanics thereof. We arrive then at the crossroads of science and ethics, much like Charles Darwin arrived with his advocacy of Evolution and John Mather with the discovery of background radiation pointing to the occurrence of The Big Bang as the inception of our universe; should we let preemptively established belief get in the way of concretely gathered evidence? As incorrect and unpopular this thesis may sound, it’s what science is pointing towards. It’s up to us if we are to accept or reject this new interpretation of intelligence
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