This new edition provides an accessible guide to advances in neuroscience research and what they reveal about intelligence. Compelling evidence shows that genetics plays a major role as intelligence develops from childhood, and that intelligence test scores correspond strongly to specific features of the brain assessed with neuroimaging. In detailed yet understandable language, Richard J. Haier explains cutting-edge techniques based on DNA and imaging of brain connectivity and function. He dispels common misconceptions – such as the belief that IQ tests are biased or meaningless. Readers will learn about the real possibility of dramatically enhancing intelligence and the positive implications this could have for education and social policy. The text also explores potential controversies surrounding neuro-poverty, neuro-socioeconomic status, and the morality of enhancing intelligence for everyone.

An accessible review of genetic and neuroimaging research that explains what determines intelligence and how we might enhance it.

This handbook introduces the reader to the thought-provoking research on the neural foundations of human intelligence. Written for undergraduate or graduate students, practitioners, and researchers in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related fields, the chapters summarize research emerging from the rapidly developing neuroscience literature on human intelligence. The volume focusses on theoretical innovation and recent advances in the measurement, modelling, and characterization of the neurobiology of intelligence differences, especially from brain imaging studies. It summarizes fundamental issues in the characterization and measurement of general intelligence, and surveys multidisciplinary research consortia and large-scale data repositories for the study of general intelligence. A systematic review of neuroimaging methods for studying intelligence is provided, including structural and diffusion-weighted MRI techniques, functional MRI methods, and spectroscopic imaging of metabolic markers of intelligence.

A lively journey through the brain’s inner workings from “one of the world’s leading cognitive neuroscientists” (The Wall Street Journal). Human intelligence builds sprawling cities, vast cornfields, and complex microchips. It takes us from the atom to the limits of the universe. How does the biological brain, a collection of billions of cells, enable us to do things no other species can do? In this book, neuroscientist John Duncan offers an adventure story—the story of the hunt for basic principles of human intelligence, behavior, and thought. Using results drawn from classical studies of intelligence testing; from attempts to build computers that think; from studies of how minds change after brain damage; from modern discoveries of brain imaging; and from groundbreaking recent research, he synthesizes often difficult-to-understand information into clear, fascinating prose about how brains work. Moving from the foundations of psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience to the most current scientific thinking, How Intelligence Happens is “a timely, original, and highly readable contribution to our understanding” (Nancy Kanwisher, MIT) from a winner of the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science

Our big brains, our language ability, and our intelligence make us uniquely human. But barely 10,000 years ago (a mere blip in evolutionary time) human-like creatures called "Boskops" flourished in South Africa. They possessed extraordinary features: forebrains roughly 50% larger than ours, and estimated IQs to match--far surpassing our own. Many of these huge fossil skulls have been discovered over the last century, but most of us have never heard of this scientific marvel. Prominent neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger compare the contents of the Boskop brain and our own brains today, and arrive at startling conclusions about our intelligence and creativity. Connecting cutting-edge theories of genetics, evolution, language, memory, learning, and intelligence, Lynch and Granger show the implications of large brains for a broad array of fields, from the current state of the art in Alzheimer's and other brain disorders, to new advances in brain-based robots that see and converse with us, and the means by which neural prosthetics-- replacement parts for the brain--are being designed and tested. The authors demystify the complexities of our brains in this fascinating and accessible book, and give us tantalizing insights into our humanity--its past, and its future.

The Neuroscience of Animal Intelligence

Elegantly written and deeply grounded in personal experience—works by Oliver Sacks come to mind—Physical Intelligence gives us a clear, illuminating examination of the intricate, mutually responsive relationship between the mind and the body as they engage (or don’t engage) in all manner of physical action. Ever wonder why you don’t walk into walls or off cliffs? How you decide if you can drive through a snowstorm? How high you are willing to climb up a ladder to change a lightbulb? Through the prisms of behavioral neurology and cognitive neuroscience, Scott Grafton brilliantly accounts for the design and workings of the action-oriented brain in synchronicity with the body in the natural world, and he shows how physical intelligence is inherent in all of us—and always in problem-solving mode. Drawing on insights gleaned from discoveries by engineers who have learned to emulate the sophisticated solutions Mother Nature has created for managing complex behavior, Grafton also demonstrates the relevance of physical intelligence with examples that each of us might face—whether the situation is mundane, exceptional, extreme, or compromised.