[ExI] Smarter mice

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 08:42:57 UTC 2014


On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 7:37 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> James Clement <clementlawyer at gmail.com> , 9/12/2014 9:37 PM:
>
> Goldman and Nedergaard's experiments are primarily concerned with finding
> ways to remyelinate damaged brains, but they both realize that if used in
> "normal" people, would likely lead to enhanced intelligence. Of course
> there's no easy funding for this, at least at this time.
>
>
> How is that supposed to work? I can imagine that a different glial
> architecture in a mouse has some effect, but in humans we would just get
> the same glial architecture.
>

### It appears that the genetic structure of high IQ involves thousands of
not-even-a-little-broken components, i.e. the absence of thousands little
mutations that are individually relatively rare and mild but collectively
they impose limitations on most brains in dozens of ways. In other words,
normal people's brains are broken in thousands of little ways, and that
probably includes mild dysfunction of the glia. Astrocytes are crucial for
energetic support of neurons - they re-process lactate from neurons, feed
and protect them, allowing a furious burn rate that the neurons themselves
would not be able to sustain. It's plausible that astrocytes from young
very high IQ individuals are better energetically than astrocytes from
non-syndromically (=likely widespread mild damage to various aspects of
brain function) IQ-limited persons.

Of course, replacing astrocytes in an adult human brain is likely to be
orders of magnitude more difficult than in mice, so I don't expect any
IQ-boost glial stem cell injections anytime soon, although repair of local
demyelination defects, which BTW are usually associated with impaired
mitochondrial function, might become possible in the not too distant (10 -
30 years) future.

I wonder if anybody put one of these injected mice in an MRI scanner to do
MRS or in a PET scanner to do an FDG scan - I bet they would find enhanced
levels of energy utilization compared to untreated mice. Human brains are
tuned to run really hot, even compared to chimpanzees (we have higher
levels of glucose transporters in the brain but lower in the muscle, which
is why chimps are so much stronger physically but lack, literally, the
brain power to match). Most likely the brains of mice are normally tuned to
run rather cold, to conserve energy, and human glia neatly slot in a
functional module there, replacing a whole chunk of evolutionary
programming. Very neat and surprising but not too difficult to understand
in hindsight.

Rafał
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