Super Brain (20 page)

At the level of personal experience, the never-ending interplay between emotion and intellect creates a running internal discourse, which is broadcast in your brain during every waking moment. For some, this discourse takes the form of an internal monologue in which the brain is doing all the “speaking,” as it draws from old memories, habits, and conditioning. For others, the discourse is more an internal dialogue, where old and new ideas contend. The person must decide which to favor, the brain’s wired-in reactions or new and unknown responses. That can be a problem.

The struggle is difficult enough that some people try to live a life of pure intellect, denying their emotional side. Jesse Livermore was an iconic investor in the stock market during the Roaring Twenties. Born in Massachusetts in 1877, he stares at us blankly and rather dourly today from old photographs. But he was among the first financiers who held no job in his life other than manipulating the numbers on a ticker tape. He lived for numbers and regulated his life with absolute precision. He left home at 8:07 every morning, and at a time when stoplights were hand-controlled by policemen standing on boxes, the sight of his limousine caused every light on Fifth Avenue to turn green.

On October 29, 1929, the disastrous Black Tuesday when the stock market crashed, Livermore’s wife assumed that he had lost his fortune, as all their friends had. She ordered the servants to clear the furniture out of their mansion, and Livermore came home to an empty house. But actually he had listened to what the numbers told him and managed to make more money that day than he ever had before. This may seem like a triumphant story for pure intellect, but during the 1930s regulation came to Wall Street. The buccaneering days, when a few rich investors could manipulate stocks at will, were over. Livermore found it hard to adapt. His trading turned erratic.
He became discouraged, then depressed, and in 1940 he retreated into the bathroom of his private club and shot himself in the head. It was never revealed what happened to his millions.

It comes naturally to our intellect to ask questions and look for answers. The human mind has an endless craving for knowledge. We live on two parallel tracks. On one track we experience everything that happens to us, while on the other we question those experiences. The cerebral cortex, the most recent addition to the brain, takes care of thinking in all its aspects, including decision making, judgment, cogitation, and comparisons. To a neurologist, the cortex is the most enigmatic part of the brain. How did neurons learn to think, and even more mysteriously, how did they learn to think about thinking?

For that is what you do every day. You have a thought, and then you reflect on what the thought means. This sounds overly abstract, so let’s diagram it from the brain’s perspective:

Instinctive: “I’m hungry.”

Emotional: “Mm, banana cream pie would taste so good right now.”

Intellectual: “Can I afford the calories?”

In the intellectual phase, you have endless choices. You can ask yourself, “Who makes a good banana cream pie?” or “Is that what I really want?” or “Does this mean I’m pregnant?” You can think anything you want to, including the most far-out idea (“Do bananas feel pain when they are picked from the tree?”), the most imaginative (“I’d like to write a children’s book about a boy who meets a talking banana cream pie”), and everything in between.

We humans are proud of our intellect, to the point that until recently we have denied that lower animals have any kind of intelligence. That’s changing quickly. Few birds winter on the snowbound north rim of the Grand Canyon, for example, and some that do
spend the autumn months picking seeds to bury in the ground. They harvest pine cones for nuts, and they give each tiny one a burial spot, apparently at random, until hundreds have been deposited. When the winter blizzards arrive, these sites are covered with snow. Yet the birds have been observed going back to each place where a pine nut is buried, pecking through the snow, and retrieving it. Each bird returns only to its own buried food, without poaching at random on the cache placed by other birds.

Examples of animal intelligence are myriad, yet we still remain certain that intellect is exclusively human. Brain structure bears this out, since relative to our brain size, which is very large for our weight, a disproportionate part belongs to the higher brain. (The fact that 90 percent of your cortex is the neocortex, the “new bark,” shows that you do a great deal of thinking and deciding, while a dolphin’s large brain is about 60 percent devoted to hearing, which makes sense for a creature that is guided by underwater sonar.) Despite the notion that we are driven by lower impulses like sex, hunger, anger, and fear, the higher brain dominates everything. After all, before two countries can go to war and bomb each other’s cities, they first must build those cities—and those bombs—which represents a massive accomplishment by the intellect.

The higher brain marks the arrival of self-awareness. Every example we’ve given uses the word
I
as part of the thought;
I
is the conscious being who is using the brain. The instinctive and emotional phases of the brain dwell in the world of the subconscious. We suppose that animal intelligence is entirely subconscious. On the same phase of the moon in May, horseshoe crabs come ashore by the tens of thousands to lay their eggs on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. They gather from the ocean depths, as they have done for hundreds of millions of years. Within the next few days, a tiny bird known as the red knot sandpiper (
Calidris canutus rufa
) arrives on its migratory route to feed on the horseshoe crab eggs scattered in the sand.

Red knots, small brown-speckled birds that step gingerly on stilted legs, spend the winter in Tierra del Fuego, thousands of miles away in the southern hemisphere, where they feed on tiny clams. No one knows why red knots migrate 9,300 miles between the Antarctic and the Arctic, where they will raise their young. Even less do we know how the red knots learned to time their migration to correspond with the last full moon or new moon in May, exactly when horseshoe crab eggs are lying around the beaches of Delaware Bay, becoming the only food that red knots eat during their stopover. Where the birds are headed, Southampton Island in Canada, is windy, bare, and bleak, affording almost no food. The highly fatty horseshoe crab eggs allow them to store up enough energy to survive. The whole complex setup implies that instinct isn’t always simple or primitive. It achieves things that intellect cannot yet fathom.

Is all of nature really unconscious, or are we trapped by our desire to label it that way? One thing is certain. In humans, the intellectual phase of the brain blends instinctive drives and emotions with knowledge gained from experience. If a person’s experiences are unhappy, the intellect can try to find better experiences, or it can take more drastic steps to end misery, such as through suicide. It was depressing but insightful for Nietzsche to say, “Man is the only animal who has to be encouraged to live.” There’s a more positive way to say the same thing: humans refuse to be dictated to by our lower brain, even when it comes to survival.

The intellectual brain uses logic and rational thought in order to deal with the world in a mindful manner. While the instinctive brain causes you to naturally and innately
react
, the intellectual brain provides you with the option of mindfully
responding
. Response comes from the Latin root
responsum
and refers to reacting in a
responsible
manner. Responding to any situation requires understanding, while reacting doesn’t. Understanding isn’t an isolated event. There’s always a social context. You must empathize with others; people must communicate and make meaningful connections. Conceivably,
Homo sapiens
could have remained sociable without these higher traits. Chimpanzees are sociable, and they broke off the primate family tree six million years after, not before, our hominid ancestors.

Looking into a chimpanzee’s eyes, one detects moments when the animal seems thoughtful, but chimps are not responsible, and for all their intelligence, they cannot push their learning curve. You can set up an experiment in which a chimpanzee watches while you hide some food under one of two boxes. If he remembers and looks under the correct box, he gets the food. It takes only a few tries for chimpanzees to learn to succeed at this. However, let’s say you change the experiment. You place two boxes in front of the chimpanzee, and if he hands you the heavier box, you give him a food reward. Even after six hundred tries, a chimpanzee will not perform better than randomly on this test. A young child of three or four figures out very quickly that it needs to choose the heavier box.

We also share our learning. Human society depends on teaching, which requires a special kind of brain, one that instantly turns experience into knowledge. After millions of years, some monkeys have learned to smash hard nuts on rocks to break them open, and higher primates like chimpanzees can use a stick to pry bird’s eggs out of deep holes in a tree trunk or ants from a hole. But this skill remains primitive. An orangutan can be taught to retrieve food from a complicated plastic container that has several moving parts that must be opened in a precise sequence. Orangutans are quick at solving this puzzle, but then they run into a block: they can’t teach another orangutan how to solve the same puzzle.

We don’t teach just by example, either, but by talking. Complex language accelerated the evolution of the brain, because it allowed for a more sophisticated mode of communication. It also allowed us to be capable of symbolic thought. This means we can create symbolic or virtual worlds using the same parts of the brain that evolved for communicating with one another. When you stop at a red light, you aren’t stopping because you hear the word
stop
. Rather,
you connect the color red with the word; it’s a symbol. Simple as that sounds, it has enormous ramifications. Dyslexic children, for example, have learning difficulties with reading due to a defect in brain development in the womb. Their brains put words and letters in reverse order. However, it has been discovered that this defect can be bypassed by using colored letters of the alphabet.
A
might be red,
B
green, and so on. With this symbolic association, language can proceed because a brain mechanism in the visual cortex has been appropriated for a new use: the ability to distinguish colors, which in humans extends to incredible subtlety: the human eye can detect 10 million different wavelengths of light. No one knows exactly how many of these translate into colors that we can discriminate between, but there seem to be several million at least.

This tremendous gift of imagination and symbol making can be turned against itself. The swastika originated as an ancient Indian symbol for the sun, but if painted on the side of a synagogue, it denotes desecration or even a hate crime. Image can also block reality. The phrase
movie goddess
was invented to reinforce the public’s fantasy that Hollywood actors aren’t like regular people. As a result, however, the public craves a peek behind the image, and the more tawdry and sordid the reality being exposed, the more titillating it is.

There’s a long history of dividing the mind into instinct, intellect, and emotions. Neuroscience can now map the regions of the brain corresponding to each. But it’s worth remembering that these divisions are only models that were invented because Nature is so hard to grasp in its full complexity. In truth, we are constantly making reality, a process that embraces every region of the brain in a constantly shifting interplay.

As with any phase of the brain, intellect can go out of balance.

If you are too intellectual, you lose the grounding of emotions and instincts. This leads to overly calculated actions and castles in the air.

If you don’t develop your intellect, it remains stuck in rudimentary thinking. This leads to superstition and falling prey to all kinds of faulty arguments. You become the pawn of influences from outside yourself.

ESSENTIAL POINTS: YOUR INTELLECTUAL BRAIN

Intellect stands for the mind’s most recent evolutionary phase.

Intellect never operates in isolation but is blended with emotions and instinct.

Intellect helps you to rationally deal with your fears and desires.

Responding to the world implies being responsible for the world.

Rational thought becomes destructive when it forgets its responsibilities. (Hence the rise of atomic weapons, the destruction of the ecosystem, etc.)

The Intuitive Phase of the Brain

Your intellect is part of your birthright, which includes an insatiable need for meaning. You inherited intuition out of a different need that is just as powerful: the need for values. Right and wrong, good and bad, are so basic that the brain is wired for them. From a very early age, infants seem to display intuitive behavior in this department. Even before the toddling stage, a baby who sees his mother drop something will offer to pick it up for her—helping is a built-in response. A two-year-old can be shown a puppet play in which one puppet does nice things while the other does the opposite. Nice involves playing and cooperating; not nice involves being selfish and complaining. When asked which puppet it likes best, a child will pick the “good” puppet much more often than the “bad” one. We have evolved with brain responses for morality.