[ExI] Incoherent ramblings on human intelligence

[Roger J. Romero]

What do you guys this says about human intelligence?

http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF02221838 <http://link.springer.com/10.1007/BF02221838>

150-000-50,000 years is incredibly, almost unbelievably short. Let’s say the average human generation was 20 years (until reproduction), that means it only took 7,500 to 2,500 generations for humans to evolve into modern behavior. 

I had always thought that human intelligence was much more advanced and complex than other species, but this timeframe seems to suggest that human intelligence can not be more than a few genetic switches away from say, our chimp relatives. What I’m saying is, perhaps we have some mental ability X that allows us to act and behave like humans, maybe it’s classifying abstract->discrete relationships between world objects at a much higher level than other species, or maybe it’s having a higher level or different form of pattern recognition all together.

Or, is it possible that behavioral modernity wasn’t due to a genetic change at all? And merely, humans being taught something during their critical period that previous humans hadn’t? For example, perfect pitch and color recognition are both acquired during the critical period and early childhood. If a child is exposed to high complexity audio (such as by having musician parents or speaking a pitch-based language like Mandarin), then they are more likely to acquire perfect pitch, perfect pitch is the ability to classify audio frequencies in real time to discrete note names. Similarly, color recognition also seems to be very important. The colors one is able to discern is highly reliant upon the society and culture one grows up in. Learning the names for colors in early life highly influences your ability to see and discern different colors, in cultures that have multiple colors for different shades of blue, they are able to discern between shades of blue much better than someone who doesn’t.

Now this makes me think of feral children. (http://sites.psu.edu/psych256sp16/2016/04/21/the-critical-period-for-language-acquisition-and-feral-children/ <http://sites.psu.edu/psych256sp16/2016/04/21/the-critical-period-for-language-acquisition-and-feral-children/>). If one has not learned to speak before puberty it is much more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to learn language and speak in a meaningful way (Coronado, 2013).

Now, here’s something interesting, apparently Valporate reopens the critical period for perfect pitch. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/>). But if it is able to re-open the critical period for perfect pitch, why not for other mental tasks as well? I imagine it would have similar effects on being able to learn a new language, color classification, maybe even slightly be able to improve intelligence as well, granting a new “critical period” for picking up complex analysis, new abstractions of complex entities, etc… I realize this is one study that may have been purely coincidental or even accidental, but I don’t see why this “critical period” of the brain can’t be reverse engineered eventually.

Also, really makes you think how much smarter the kids of tomorrow are going to be… IQ seems to be increasing at ~3 points per decade here in the US… My 2 year old nephew cousin is able to operate an iPad, switch apps, etc.. before even learning how to speak. 

Something else interesting, the same neurons that fish use to walk on the ocean floor also light up in land vertebrates when walking… https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/science/skate-walking-fish-evolution.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/science/skate-walking-fish-evolution.html> these neurons are thought to have been 375 million years old… So a heavy, large portion of intelligence is very very ancient, and in comparison, human intelligence very recent. 



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