Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest. He will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have doctor Rex Young on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor Young is an Assistant Professor of neurosurgery at the
Speaker 1: University of New Mexico and a clinical neuropsychologist in private
Speaker 1: practice in Alburqi. I Hope I said that right Alberka
Speaker 1: No in Albertquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of the University
Speaker 1: of New Mexico, he has practiced neuropsychology in Albuquerque since
Speaker 1: two thousand and two. His clinical work now sent around
Speaker 1: introoperative testing of patients undergoing a weak cranny tominy. You
Speaker 1: know this is the hardest biography to read it ever
Speaker 1: design Yeah, just goes away craniotomy to remove tumors within
Speaker 1: eloquent brain tissue. Work with particular relevance to the study
Speaker 1: of individual differences, which we will talk about. He's contributed
Speaker 1: over one hundred research articles across a wide range of
Speaker 1: disciplines involving both clinical and normal populations designed to assess
Speaker 1: brain behavior relationships. He's the editor of the Cambridge Handbook
Speaker 1: of the Neuroscience of Creativity, and his work has been
Speaker 1: featured on CNN, BBC, NOVA, The New York Times, The Atlantic,
Speaker 1: and National Geographic. Is there anything that doctor Rex Young
Speaker 1: can't do? Is the question. Great to have you on
Speaker 1: the podcast today. Thanks Scott, It's great to talk to you.
Speaker 1: I've known you for quite some time, and even before
Speaker 1: you knew me. I knew you as I was working
Speaker 1: on my dissertation and citing your excellent work on the
Speaker 1: neuroscience of intelligence and the p fit theory. But even
Speaker 1: like what predates that, even that work, we'll get to
Speaker 1: all this, We'll get to the nerve science of intelligence,
Speaker 1: We'll get to the nerve sides of creativity. We'll get
Speaker 1: to your crany crendiatomy work. But can we start like
Speaker 1: when you were in grad school? What was your dissertation topic?
Speaker 1: My dissertation topic was biochemical correlates of intelligence. So I
Speaker 1: was doing work in intelligence even back in my graduate work.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I was doing stuff with intelligence back then.
Speaker 1: My advisor ron Yo was interested in individual differences, so
Speaker 1: I was very fortunate to be, you know, starting work
Speaker 1: in individual differences even back then, way back in the
Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties, when you know, before fMRI, before some
Speaker 1: modern neuroimaging techniques that even had even hit. We were
Speaker 1: using a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which looks at
Speaker 1: brain biochemistry. So we're able to use that technique that
Speaker 1: is so groundbreaking at the time. I mean, and also
Speaker 1: was it controversial? You know, like there's this controversy surrounding
Speaker 1: the discussion of intelligence. So even if you just use
Speaker 1: the word intelligence, like if you say this you study
Speaker 1: the science of intelligence, you don't even say what you study,
Speaker 1: people hate you already and then you know, like already
Speaker 1: off the bat. If you just say and then you say,
Speaker 1: but I studied the neuro anatomy of intelligence, they like,
Speaker 1: dave a special room in hell for you. So what
Speaker 1: was that like around that time? Because I hope it
Speaker 1: felt groundbreaking to you, because it was it did feel
Speaker 1: It did feel groundbreaking, It felt different. I had to
Speaker 1: argue with my advisor at the time to do this,
Speaker 1: you know, this study, and then the director of the
Speaker 1: center that I was working at said, you know, this
Speaker 1: is going to be a career ender for you. You
Speaker 1: don't want to get into intelligence research. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of pushback even in the mid
Speaker 1: nineties to steer away from intelligence research because it was
Speaker 1: you know, it's always been controversial, and it was even
Speaker 1: controversial back then, and people were trying to advise me
Speaker 1: to stick to, you know, more traditional types of research,
Speaker 1: stick to social psychology is what they meant to say. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I was working in a lab where they
Speaker 1: were studying systemic lupus arithmetosis. So there's another tongue twister. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see traumatic brain injury. So we were studying neurological
Speaker 1: diseases and they were really you know, we were applying
Speaker 1: the spectroscopic technique and finding you know, interesting biochemical correlates
Speaker 1: with neuropsychological measures of all these diseases. And I was asking,
Speaker 1: has anyone ever looked at normal brain functioning and why
Speaker 1: would you do that? And so we started to look
Speaker 1: at normal brain functioning and that kind of led to
Speaker 1: my career and at what point. Did you intersect with
Speaker 1: the Richard Higher is it? Yeah? And is it fair
Speaker 1: to say you're like co creators of the p fit model? Sure? Yeah,
Speaker 1: very fair to say that. So in two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: I heard of a conference that was going to be
Speaker 1: held in Newport Beach, California. ISIR was holding a conference
Speaker 1: where Vivek Probacheron, who's a neurologist. Paul Thompson, who is
Speaker 1: a pretty famous neuro scientist these days, started Enigma, which
Speaker 1: looks at genetics and neuroimaging. Who else was there another
Speaker 1: famous neuroimaging researcher who's at University of Michigan now whose
Speaker 1: name escapes me. I think you studied with him, but anyway,
Speaker 1: Jeremy Gray. Yeah, Jeremy Gray was my advisor exactly, so
Speaker 1: I knew you would know him advisor. Yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: Jeremy Gray was there, I mean, and they were talking
Speaker 1: about neuroimaging of intelligence. And so I had this little
Speaker 1: spectroscopic study, and so I cold emailed rich Hire and said,
Speaker 1: I think I should be presenting at this conference because
Speaker 1: I've done neuroimaging of intelligence, and so he invited me
Speaker 1: to present with Jeremy Gray and Paul Thompson and b Beck, Perbaccaron,
Speaker 1: and so I kind of invited myself to this conference
Speaker 1: and off we went. That's an incredible Bax like origin
Speaker 1: story that involved that somehow involved my advisor. So like
Speaker 1: Jeremy Gray was there. I met him at that conference.
Speaker 1: That's incredible because I cited your work quite a bit
Speaker 1: in my dissertation under his supervision. Yeah. Cool. So there
Speaker 1: was a point at which you were talking to Richard
Speaker 1: and it was like it became queerly. There was a
Speaker 1: great confluence of his findings from his lab and the
Speaker 1: findings from your lab and as well as other labs
Speaker 1: and kind of pointing to a particular truth about the
Speaker 1: neurocorrelates or structural and functional correlates of intelligence. Can you
Speaker 1: maybe tell our listeners who are not neuroscientists themselves, as
Speaker 1: clean speak as possible sort of what was the model
Speaker 1: a pifit model, how could they understand it? Well, the
Speaker 1: basic idea was that there's a distributed pattern or distributed
Speaker 1: model of brain organization that underlies intelligence. The predominant model
Speaker 1: at the time, Jeremy Gray was a proponent of this
Speaker 1: at the time was that the frontal lobes are massive.
Speaker 1: Frontal lobes were very important and perhaps central to intelligence,
Speaker 1: and what we kept finding, what my research certainly showed
Speaker 1: was that the parietal lobes were very involved, the back
Speaker 1: parts of the brain were very involved in intelligence, and
Speaker 1: that this tended to lead to a distributed model of
Speaker 1: intelligence as opposed to the frontal lobes being predominant. So
Speaker 1: we first called this model the Einstein hypothesis because Einstein's
Speaker 1: brain was remarkable because of abnormalities in his parietal lobe,
Speaker 1: and so we really wanted to focus on pardal abnormalities.
Speaker 1: The reviewers roundly rejected that because Einstein's only one individual
Speaker 1: and it's quite controversial about you know, genius and intelligence.
Speaker 1: And so then we arrived at the P fit parietal
Speaker 1: frontal integration theory, with p being predominant, that parietal comes
Speaker 1: first instead of the frontal lobes predominated. So I have
Speaker 1: a personal question. You know, you came to my one
Speaker 1: of my talks, and I've told you about how when
Speaker 1: I was younger, I didn't do wonderfully on IQ tests
Speaker 1: and you're like, well, let me measure your brain, and
Speaker 1: in a way, didn't you confirm that I'm dumb, like,
Speaker 1: didn't you find out you have? You found that I
Speaker 1: have like a small frontal lobe though, right, So how
Speaker 1: do we reconcile this with the p fit theory? So?
Speaker 1: I think the p fit theory is interesting because there's
Speaker 1: a distributed model for brain organization, and I think your brain,
Speaker 1: your wonderful brain, confirms this distributed model that you can have,
Speaker 1: you know, smaller structures in your frontal lobe. You can
Speaker 1: have smaller structures here and there, but that this distributed model,
Speaker 1: there's other parts of the brain that can pick up
Speaker 1: the slack. So are you just saying that to make
Speaker 1: me feel better about my I mean no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you mean that you did find. The one thing that
Speaker 1: you did find in me is a very very very
Speaker 1: thick corpus closo, right right, right, So do you think
Speaker 1: that like compensated for well, yeah, yeah, different brain organizations
Speaker 1: can lead to the manifestation of intelligence creativity. There's not
Speaker 1: one size fits all, but certainly across you know, all
Speaker 1: of these studies, these thirty six or something studies that
Speaker 1: we found the parietal and frontal lobes predominated. And again
Speaker 1: with intelligence studies creativity studies at the level of the individual,
Speaker 1: all bets are off. I mean, these are only averages
Speaker 1: across you know, large groups of individuals. So at the
Speaker 1: level of an individual, and you know, we can talk
Speaker 1: about the way craniotomies and individual brains. At some point
Speaker 1: perhaps you really have to look at the individual and
Speaker 1: how their brain or is organized to manifest language, to
Speaker 1: manifest intelligence, to manifest creativity. And your wonderful brain manifests
Speaker 1: it slightly different than the average brain in our cohort,
Speaker 1: but of course it gets the job done. So I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously I love that answer because I'm a bit not
Speaker 1: just because for my own ego, but also just I'm
Speaker 1: a big advocate for neurodiversity and the neudiversity movement, and
Speaker 1: it is interesting, Like you know, I looked at some
Speaker 1: of Goldstein's writings for his idea of self actualization actually
Speaker 1: came about from looking at the amazing ability of the
Speaker 1: brain for other neurotissue to kind of take over things
Speaker 1: that had deficits, and Maslow co opted that from Goldstein
Speaker 1: the term self actualization. Yeah, I always thought that was
Speaker 1: really interesting, and we rely on that in these brain
Speaker 1: tumor patients and we were taking out literally taking out
Speaker 1: parts of their brain. We rely on neuroplasticity for other
Speaker 1: parts of the brain to take up the slack and
Speaker 1: to take up some of the cortical activities, memory being
Speaker 1: predominant some language tasks, although language is like less plastic,
Speaker 1: but memory being predominant. If you take someone's temporal lobe,
Speaker 1: the other temporal lobe has to take up the activity
Speaker 1: and the work of the temporal lobe that had a
Speaker 1: tumor in it. So we really rely on that neuroplasticity
Speaker 1: very very much in tumor work. I love that. And
Speaker 1: then it's also possible then too for some of these
Speaker 1: brain areas to compensate but also like contribute to intelligence proper.
Speaker 1: My Q when I was tested with you was not
Speaker 1: as well as it was when I was a child.
Speaker 1: It was even one I could say, on a higher
Speaker 1: end of the spectrum, right, Oh certain, Yeah, But isn't
Speaker 1: that interesting because when I was measured at age eleven
Speaker 1: and I was suffering from this learning disability, you know,
Speaker 1: I was not in my best in that. So twenty
Speaker 1: many years later, these kind of brain areas can contribute
Speaker 1: to the development of intelligence across the lifespan well, And
Speaker 1: I don't know how I think you had a central
Speaker 1: auditory processing disorder at the time, and you're hearing, you know,
Speaker 1: wasn't so great, and some of those things were remediated
Speaker 1: over time as well, so your brain was able to
Speaker 1: not only compensate, but have some correction I guess or
Speaker 1: help in those areas along the way so that you
Speaker 1: could develop. And frankly, yeah, an IQ test within that
Speaker 1: context is going to be an unfair measure of your
Speaker 1: cognitive capacity. Whereas you know, down the road, I think
Speaker 1: even though an intelligence test may not capture your full
Speaker 1: cognitive capacity, and we can talk about that, it gets
Speaker 1: closer to a fair measure cognitive capacity than when you
Speaker 1: were a child. Oh I hope. So now the other thing.
Speaker 1: The other thing dimension though, is the you know, intelligence
Speaker 1: tests were designed to show children that needed more help,
Speaker 1: and certainly you needed help early on if you did
Speaker 1: have a central auditory processing disorder. The fact that you
Speaker 1: were you know, held back for such a long period
Speaker 1: time as an abomination, you know, when you wanted to
Speaker 1: thrive and excel and we're looking for more environmental stimulus
Speaker 1: for your brain and you were being held back because
Speaker 1: of that early test. Well beyond the period when you
Speaker 1: should have is an abomination. Well, it certainly showed that
Speaker 1: you needed some help at that early point because your
Speaker 1: brain wasn't processing information fully. For sure, I certainly wish
Speaker 1: you were my school psychologist instead of the one I had.
Speaker 1: But I also, you know, just saw greater possibilities for
Speaker 1: so many of my friends who were in special at
Speaker 1: as well. And this idea of your either learning disabled
Speaker 1: or your gift intellectually gifted seemed to me like a
Speaker 1: false dichotomy even when I was a young kid. And
Speaker 1: it is. So you see that in the brain as well.
Speaker 1: You see cases where there's clearly I don't like the
Speaker 1: word deficit, but you see some brain abnormalities, but you
Speaker 1: also see some extraordinary strengths in these visuals. Do you
Speaker 1: come across this kind of stuff? Definitely? And so I
Speaker 1: was on the I mean, just to kind of finish
Speaker 1: that point, I'm on the work committee for the ICD
Speaker 1: eleven to create a new definition for intellectual disability. And
Speaker 1: one of the goals of this work group was to
Speaker 1: move beyond the use of IQ tests for the definition
Speaker 1: of intellectual disability. As you know, this has relied intellectual
Speaker 1: disability mental retardation. It used to be called intellectual disability
Speaker 1: now has been almost entirely dependent on an IQ test
Speaker 1: that does not give you any idea of how an
Speaker 1: individual can perform in their life. And so this new
Speaker 1: definition advocates for particular neurocognitive measures executive functioning, working memory,
Speaker 1: language functioning beyond that intellectual measure, because you have to
Speaker 1: understand what these particular cognitive capacities are in order to
Speaker 1: find out how well or what help a person needs
Speaker 1: at an individual level to succeed within their given environment.
Speaker 1: And so getting things like you know, impulsivity or executive
Speaker 1: functioning or language abilities beyond that mere IQ test is
Speaker 1: super important at the next instantiation of the ICD ten
Speaker 1: or ICD eleven. I'm so glad that you I'm glad
Speaker 1: you're on the committee, but they should be grateful that
Speaker 1: you are on the committee as well, because you offer
Speaker 1: a lot a good important perspective for that. It's a
Speaker 1: neuropsychological perspective, which is beyond you know, reiffining IQ as
Speaker 1: the one measure that solves all problems and the one
Speaker 1: hammer that hits all nails right right well. And it's
Speaker 1: something else occurred to me when you were talking about
Speaker 1: how well like you doesn't necessarily indicate that you will
Speaker 1: be dysfunctional in your life. But I would also say,
Speaker 1: if you've ever been to a MENSA meeting, having an
Speaker 1: extra having as in the other end, also doesn't guarantee that, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, just having a high IQ doesn't ensure that
Speaker 1: you're going to be successful either, right, So I mean,
Speaker 1: and MENSA is a perfectly good example of that. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a nice club of people that do puzzles, but
Speaker 1: beyond that, it sounds extraordinarily boring to me been to
Speaker 1: a MENSA meeting, So perhaps I'm not a good person
Speaker 1: to judge. Well, I certainly don't want to be on
Speaker 1: record for talking smack about MENSA because they gave me
Speaker 1: an award in twenty twelve, and anyone who gives me
Speaker 1: an award is you know, I love them. But there
Speaker 1: was a scientifically published study recently conducted on mens of
Speaker 1: membership a very very high proportion of psycho pathology among
Speaker 1: that population, and researchers like you know, proposed that high
Speaker 1: IQ might actually like be comorbid with psychopathology. But it
Speaker 1: was literally just on MENSA people, a selected sample, so
Speaker 1: it didn't seem to me like if they looked at
Speaker 1: the general population, you would really find that if anything,
Speaker 1: you find IQ could be a protective factor, right, I
Speaker 1: guess it's usually a protective factor, but it could. I mean,
Speaker 1: knowing your IQ could create some expectations that, if not meant,
Speaker 1: could lead to increased anxiety, depression, things like that. So
Speaker 1: I could see, you know, it's a chicken or egg phenomenon.
Speaker 1: So if you if you happen to know your IQ
Speaker 1: and you know it's extremely high, and then you're not,
Speaker 1: you know, a CEO of a company or a professor
Speaker 1: or master of whatever domain that you are working in,
Speaker 1: then that might lead to increased anxiety or psychopathology. And
Speaker 1: then also, I was a great point. First of all,
Speaker 1: a great point. I love to do the yes end
Speaker 1: thing and improv yes yes. And on the flip side,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll say that growing up in special ed
Speaker 1: as a kid and thinking my IQ was well, having
Speaker 1: that narrative in my head and then and then doing
Speaker 1: like succeeding academically created an imposter syndrome feeling. So I
Speaker 1: think on the other end, by the way, well, I
Speaker 1: tell tell me your story. Really well, I don't know
Speaker 1: my IQ, but I mean, most most academics have some
Speaker 1: sort of imposters. Oh I see, I see yeah, yeah, yeah, good, well,
Speaker 1: thank you. I feel a great moment of connection there
Speaker 1: about that. Then I really felt like, you know, because
Speaker 1: I was getting learning it pretty easily. Once I applied
Speaker 1: myself and I realised I loved learning, I almost felt like, wait,
Speaker 1: am I allowed to be good at learning if my
Speaker 1: IQ is not above a certain threshold? Like? Am I
Speaker 1: breaking the defining the laws of physics? You know? They
Speaker 1: just had they just had you, They just had you
Speaker 1: pegged wrong. It's so interesting to now be in this
Speaker 1: field and reflect back on that. It puts us in
Speaker 1: a unique position to reflect on ourselves as psychologists. So
Speaker 1: we're turn real quick to the neuroplasticity thing. By the way,
Speaker 1: did you ever there's a tangent, but are you a
Speaker 1: fan of comedy? Did you ever see Jimmy Glick show
Speaker 1: on Comedy Central in the nineties. I've seen bits and
Speaker 1: pieces of it, yeah with Martin Short, Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1: I almost felt like I was about to have a
Speaker 1: jew like, No, let's talk about prasticity. Yeah, can we
Speaker 1: should go back to neuroplasticity? So you know, you so
Speaker 1: you're actually catching this reference. Yes, I am, Yes, I
Speaker 1: love it. I took a risk because you know it's
Speaker 1: very obscure reference. Yeah. Although I look a little bit
Speaker 1: closer to Jimmy Glick than you do, Scott Great, Well,
Speaker 1: that may be true. However, neither of us look anything
Speaker 1: like him, even if you are closer too. Yeah. So okay,
Speaker 1: So you know you we were on the stage together
Speaker 1: at ninety two I events and you made a comment
Speaker 1: that I just can't get. I have not been able
Speaker 1: to get out of my head since that one day
Speaker 1: a stage we were talking. People on stage were talking
Speaker 1: about neuroplasticity, and you're like, yeah, but I think people
Speaker 1: go too far in talking about neuroplasticity. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's like as plastic as people were saying. Can you
Speaker 1: walk me back to that day, that comment, the context,
Speaker 1: and and let and and it just stood out of
Speaker 1: my head because I'm a real truth seeker like you are,
Speaker 1: and I when someone says something to me like that
Speaker 1: that makes me the kind of challenges a prevailing sort
Speaker 1: of narrative or something like, I listen to that person
Speaker 1: because it's I've got really interesting. Can you tell me
Speaker 1: what you're you're thinking about. That was about neuroplasticity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you remember that? Do you remember that? By the way,
Speaker 1: I do you remember that? Because yeah, and I tell
Speaker 1: it to my patients to this day, because people talk
Speaker 1: about neuroplasticity kind of as if it's this magic the
Speaker 1: lickxer thing, you know, sprinkly thing that we can sprinkle
Speaker 1: on people, and that it will kind of solve all
Speaker 1: the problems, and it can do a lot. Neuroplasticity is
Speaker 1: very important, but it again is not the hammer that
Speaker 1: hits all nails, and it is not an infinite capacity.
Speaker 1: So there are limited things that neuroplasticity can do and
Speaker 1: things that neuroplasticity cannot do, And to use it in
Speaker 1: its generic term is a bit imprecise. For example, a vision,
Speaker 1: if we sever the major pathways Myers loops that go
Speaker 1: through your perile cortex into your excipital lobe and leave
Speaker 1: you with what's called the homonymous hemiinopsia that you cannot
Speaker 1: see out of the half of either of your eyes.
Speaker 1: That is a permanent thing. It's never coming back. It
Speaker 1: is not plastic. Vision has zero neuroplasticity in terms of
Speaker 1: severing those tracks and damage to the excipital lobe, that
Speaker 1: those are laid down so early in life that the
Speaker 1: plasticity of that is virtually zero. Same with well, motor
Speaker 1: functioning is not zero, but you can regain some function.
Speaker 1: But if you damage the primary motor cortex, the plasticity
Speaker 1: of the other cortex in your other hemisphere to take
Speaker 1: over that functioning of your contralateral part of your body
Speaker 1: is very small. Game over, well, it's game minimal memory,
Speaker 1: as I was talking about, the plasticity of that is
Speaker 1: pretty good. We can expect if we take your left
Speaker 1: temporal lobe because there's a tumor in it, or if
Speaker 1: you have epilepsy and that's your seizure generator and you
Speaker 1: have a sclerotic hippocampus and that has to go, we
Speaker 1: can expect your verbal memory if we take your left
Speaker 1: temporal lobe to reorganize in your non dominant hemisphere. Now
Speaker 1: that being said, it's also going to crowd out some
Speaker 1: of your nonverbal memory because there is limited brain capacity.
Speaker 1: So for any plasticity to happen, you also have to
Speaker 1: ask what brain function is being crowded out. For every gain,
Speaker 1: there is something that's being lost. For every environmental demand
Speaker 1: that your brain lays down neurons. There's also things that
Speaker 1: are going away because you do have a limited space
Speaker 1: between your ears and inside your skull with these neurons
Speaker 1: that are devoted to meeting environmental demands. And so neuroplasticity
Speaker 1: does happen up to a point, but it is not infinite,
Speaker 1: and it depends on what we're talking about. So just
Speaker 1: to use neuroplasticity in a generic sense for everything in
Speaker 1: anything doesn't make much sense to me. If you're talking
Speaker 1: about neuroplasticity of intelligence, well, we can talk about improving intelligence,
Speaker 1: which is an interesting conversation and studies have been done.
Speaker 1: There's positive and negative results related to that. And does
Speaker 1: it regress back to the mean after a period of time?
Speaker 1: Is it near transfer or far transfer? All these types
Speaker 1: of things. Does a crowd out working memory? All these things?
Speaker 1: But that's, you know, something that is within the realm
Speaker 1: of neuroplasticity. So that's a very long winded answer to
Speaker 1: your very pithy question. Oh well, you know, I thought
Speaker 1: it was a great answer and really something to think about.
Speaker 1: There was a best selling book a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Dodge,
Speaker 1: I think, or so have you read it? I have
Speaker 1: not read it. I read very few of these books.
Speaker 1: Well maybe you should write one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: another topic. Yeah, well, I think it's an important caveat something.
Speaker 1: You know that the mind is not infinitely valuable, but
Speaker 1: you know the idea of neuroplus that he does capture
Speaker 1: the general publics. The public loves that stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: like faling very appealing. That can change our minds, to
Speaker 1: change our brains is enormously appealing. But you know how
Speaker 1: much who knows? Is are there? Genetic constraints? Who knows
Speaker 1: are there? You know? How much time do you want
Speaker 1: to spend to do that? You know this famous Dragansky
Speaker 1: study that I cite in a lot of my talks,
Speaker 1: where you've learned to juggle for three months three ball juggling,
Speaker 1: and you get a little blip of volume change in
Speaker 1: your right parietal excipital temporal junction. That took three months
Speaker 1: of very concerted juggling to where you know, people who
Speaker 1: didn't know how to do that at all got a
Speaker 1: little half a centimeter of tissue volume change over that
Speaker 1: period of time. And that's that's neuroplasticity, but it's very
Speaker 1: very small amount of brain tissue that was noticed to
Speaker 1: be changed in that very concerted effort of three ball juggling. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I had, you know, this connection between genetics and
Speaker 1: how it codes for the proteins that eventually build up
Speaker 1: to brain. And I had a chat on my podcast
Speaker 1: with Robert Pullman, who is this obviously you know, behavior
Speaker 1: geneticis And we got a little bit of a heated,
Speaker 1: respectful discussion because I felt like he was being a
Speaker 1: little bit too deterministic about it about the situation. How
Speaker 1: He's like, we really like way way over estimate the
Speaker 1: extent to which the environment impacts us at all, Like
Speaker 1: we need to stop with this Puto Coal correctness. You know.
Speaker 1: It's like it's the genes. And I mean, if that
Speaker 1: is true, then I don't see a mechanism where like
Speaker 1: immediately genes like build the brain, you know, like outside
Speaker 1: of any context. I just don't see a developmental mechanism
Speaker 1: where that could possibly be true. Yeah, I think, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm very humble about this. I think our knowledge about
Speaker 1: this is very rudimentary, and I think our best estimate,
Speaker 1: the best starting point is fifty to fifty. You know,
Speaker 1: fifty percent genes fifty percent environment is probably our best
Speaker 1: starting point for just about any complex human behavior. And
Speaker 1: so you're saying it's a chain. So whether or not
Speaker 1: it'll be gene or environment, no, no, I see genes
Speaker 1: also a bad joke. It was a bad jokes. Well, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: thank you. Sorry. And then also though, genes only work
Speaker 1: through interaction with environment, so you know, genes do not
Speaker 1: turn on and off in isolation. If you're kept in
Speaker 1: a dark room with no interaction with the environment, the
Speaker 1: genes aren't going to work. So you know, the complex
Speaker 1: gene environment interactions we don't even pretend to understand, uh currently,
Speaker 1: So I just you know, I throw up my hands
Speaker 1: and say, it's it's really too complex for us to
Speaker 1: take a really hard stand on this currently. And fifty
Speaker 1: to fifty sounds about right to me. And that's why
Speaker 1: you haven't written a best selling book yet exactly because
Speaker 1: it's not going to be dogmatic about it like he,
Speaker 1: I mean, Pullman for most of his career has been
Speaker 1: so careful and you know, he's done great scientific work.
Speaker 1: It has been very clear about the caveats. But then
Speaker 1: he writes his pop er book and it's all the
Speaker 1: caveats go out the freaking window. And it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: like maybe that's what happens when you, you know, write,
Speaker 1: you write a book, You're you're selling ideas. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true, it's true. Okay, so let's talk about creativity. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's go into the world the realm of creativity, because
Speaker 1: what I find so interesting is the realm of the
Speaker 1: intelligence neusience of intelligence. That universe sometimes looks like the
Speaker 1: complete opposite universe then the universe of the neuroscience of creativity.
Speaker 1: Sometimes sometimes although I like to say, well sometimes I
Speaker 1: like to say tongue in cheek that everything that I
Speaker 1: say about this evil, bad, racist world of intelligence is
Speaker 1: sweetness and light. When I go in front of a
Speaker 1: group of creativity audience, when you're talking about creativity, it's wonderful.
Speaker 1: All of these complex and hard issues of individual differences
Speaker 1: and brain correlates are wonderful when you're talking about creativity
Speaker 1: instead of intelligence, even though you're talking about exactly the
Speaker 1: same issues. Intelligence has such a bad rap, but creativity
Speaker 1: immediately gets a pass. So it's quite fascinating when I
Speaker 1: go to give a creativity talk and I'm talking about
Speaker 1: some of the exact same issues as intelligence, including genetic contributions,
Speaker 1: and people are much more comfortable talking about high genetic
Speaker 1: corelates or penetrance in a creative aspect as opposed to
Speaker 1: an intellectual aspect. It's it's just fascinating. It is fascinating.
Speaker 1: Why do you think it is the case? Why do
Speaker 1: you think intelligence is such a ludded word? Is the
Speaker 1: history of the intelligence testing and the uses that it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's a hard it's a hard history to overcome,
Speaker 1: and you know, we continue to struggle with that. But
Speaker 1: you know, at some point we do need to recogniz
Speaker 1: is that we're talking about these fundamental human attributes that
Speaker 1: are true across intelligence, creativity, personality, all aspects, aptitudes, all
Speaker 1: aspects of individual differences. And to take it's hard, but
Speaker 1: to take a dispassionate look at it when we're looking
Speaker 1: at it scientifically, I know, when looked at politically, and
Speaker 1: some of these things are political because intelligence tests are
Speaker 1: used in schools, for example, and they're used in some
Speaker 1: realms that have a political slant to them. Creativity tests
Speaker 1: are too, They're used for gifted and talented selection as well.
Speaker 1: So some of these same controversial issues apply to tests
Speaker 1: of creativity, but again get less baggage attached to them.
Speaker 1: So I think we I don't know. I hope that
Speaker 1: we're doing better in one hundred years, that we can
Speaker 1: look at science without such immediate bibilis I guess word,
Speaker 1: and not devolved to our camps. But I mean, I've
Speaker 1: I've tried to have these conversations, and you and I
Speaker 1: have had these wonderful conversations in a variety of venues
Speaker 1: with people that are hostile to intelligence and hostile to
Speaker 1: even creativity that I think we can just keep who's
Speaker 1: hostile creativity? Well, some artists don't like talking about the
Speaker 1: creative process, or like me, talking about the creative process
Speaker 1: and such scientific terms when it's so mysterious. For example,
Speaker 1: So I don't know that was a Jimmy another Jimney
Speaker 1: glick moment, doesn't like it. You can always find someone
Speaker 1: hostile to your point of view. Yes, yes, this is true,
Speaker 1: This is actually a profound point. I'm going to write
Speaker 1: that quote down. I'm going to tweet that yes, yes,
Speaker 1: find someone hostile to your point of view, reck saying okay,
Speaker 1: yum ohong, sorry, now you're confusing me. I thought I
Speaker 1: was young. So when it's profound, it's yum, oh, I
Speaker 1: see it when I'm quoting you, when I'm quoting that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So creativity neuroscience of creativity now you find whereas in
Speaker 1: the neuroscience of intelligence, mostly kind of this lateral prefontal
Speaker 1: cortex is connecting there with the pridal of But when
Speaker 1: you get into the realm of the neuroscience of creativity,
Speaker 1: it seems like your reviews of the literature show that
Speaker 1: more of the medial prefrontal regions like relate to what's
Speaker 1: called the default mode network, play more of a role.
Speaker 1: Can you explain to the general public what in the
Speaker 1: world that means what I just said. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a little hard to explain. But the lateral parts of
Speaker 1: the brain are more involved in expression of behavior in
Speaker 1: the external world, the manifestation of behavior in the external world,
Speaker 1: doing things out in the world, whereas the medial parts
Speaker 1: of the brain are more involved in internal representations thinking
Speaker 1: about things, thinking about your relationships, thinking about the past,
Speaker 1: thinking about the future, mental time travel, so mental simulations
Speaker 1: are involved in this default mode network. So it's a
Speaker 1: really important capacity that humans have to be able to
Speaker 1: simulate or try out ideas before you buy them in
Speaker 1: the external world. And I think that in terms of
Speaker 1: novelty generation, which is one half of the creativity definition,
Speaker 1: that novelty generation part is seems to be very involved
Speaker 1: in the neural networks that overlap with the default mode
Speaker 1: network or the medial parts of the brain. So to me,
Speaker 1: it seems like a beautiful architecture trectoral design element. It
Speaker 1: almost poetic that like the lateral you know, outside surface
Speaker 1: of the brain is or involved in your conscious perception
Speaker 1: of the outside world, your medial defall MOW network, the
Speaker 1: inside of your brain is more functionally related to inner
Speaker 1: thought and imagination. I mean, that's kind of beautiful, isn't it.
Speaker 1: It is beautiful. The more you understand about the architecture
Speaker 1: of the brain, the more beauty you see in it. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's really beautifully designed the hands of God well or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these evolution God, both these networks that we're starting to
Speaker 1: appreciate are really elegantly designed, if you will, or organized
Speaker 1: if you won't, that in such a way to create
Speaker 1: a interplay that allows us to survive, allows us to
Speaker 1: solve problems both long term and short term. Problems and
Speaker 1: allows us to move back and forth between these worlds
Speaker 1: in very rapid sequence and in demand in service of
Speaker 1: environmental demands. So it is really an elegant design that
Speaker 1: allows us to survive and has allowed us to survive
Speaker 1: and thrive up to the present day. So I really
Speaker 1: see both intelligence and creativity and perhaps personality as really
Speaker 1: important survival tools that have persisted in our brain organization
Speaker 1: over time that have led to both wonderful and horrible things,
Speaker 1: including the nuclear bomb and the internet, and wonderful things
Speaker 1: technology that will allow us to survive hopefully into the
Speaker 1: next century. It's beautiful. Yeah, I'm glad that we could
Speaker 1: share that moment of appreciation for brain organization. And Okay,
Speaker 1: so creativity important for the future civilization. We're both agreed
Speaker 1: on that, right. What about genius? What the hell is genius?
Speaker 1: Like you talk about neuroscience, intelligen you talk about neurosy,
Speaker 1: the creativity, Now, genius is one of these phenomenons, Like
Speaker 1: it's not just you're not just going to understand it
Speaker 1: by looking at neuroscience of it, right, Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: so genius, I think is three things now and my
Speaker 1: thinking has evolved over time. I think Certainly it's the
Speaker 1: interplay of probably high level of intelligence. Most if not all,
Speaker 1: of our geniuses of the past arguably have had high
Speaker 1: ish levels of intelligence. Too high could be perhaps problematic.
Speaker 1: We can talk about that. Certainly, high levels of creativity
Speaker 1: are involved in the manifestation of genius. And then the
Speaker 1: third thing that is involved is some idea that really
Speaker 1: takes hold in society, that is like a virus that
Speaker 1: overwhelms society in such a way that it is really
Speaker 1: pushes society forward in some meaningful way. So it has
Speaker 1: to be recognized by society as something that really is
Speaker 1: of such novelty and utility that it pushes society forward
Speaker 1: in a very important way. Right. But you see that
Speaker 1: as the juxtaposition of intelligence and creativity and opportunity. Yeah, intelligence, creativity,
Speaker 1: and opportunity, if you will, I guess that's your word.
Speaker 1: But I accept it that there is the opportunity or
Speaker 1: intersection of those talents with the society's recognition or zeitgeist,
Speaker 1: or the manifestation of an idea that is outrageously popular
Speaker 1: and takes off. Yeah. I've always been really fascinated with
Speaker 1: Dean Simonton's research on multiples. Yeah, and there's some you know,
Speaker 1: the cultural milos where some things are in the air.
Speaker 1: You know, certain ideas are kind of right. Picking doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that every brain is going to pick it, but
Speaker 1: high likelihood that if you have a certain threshold of
Speaker 1: expertise at least, you know, you'll see that we need
Speaker 1: to do that. Yeah, that's what we need to do, right,
Speaker 1: And if Einstein hadn't come up with the theory of relativity,
Speaker 1: it would have perhaps emerged by now, certainly by now,
Speaker 1: but in the next you know, ten years after nineteen
Speaker 1: oh five or whatever. So funny, so we're to think
Speaker 1: about it was that long ago, nineteen oh five. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just how little instruments we had to test his
Speaker 1: theories that he had that imagination that had panned out
Speaker 1: to be correct. I mean, that's that's quite a thing
Speaker 1: to be able to imagine such a vast, infinite universe
Speaker 1: and have the time to do it. I mean, talk
Speaker 1: about opportunity. I mean, he was not burdened by an
Speaker 1: academic career, if you will. He worked in a patent office,
Speaker 1: so he had the time to allow his imagination to
Speaker 1: roam widely and without the you know kind of burden.
Speaker 1: If like I said of having to be a professor
Speaker 1: or be a woman and have to have childbirth, and sure,
Speaker 1: yea many things that many things that would occupy your
Speaker 1: imagination or occupy your cognitive resources at the time. So gosh,
Speaker 1: there's so many ways we go with that. But I
Speaker 1: think that I want to make sure that we talk
Speaker 1: about awake craniometries. Yes, I did it, I did it. Yes,
Speaker 1: I've been practicing it all internally. Yes. Wait, but actually
Speaker 1: before we talk about I do want to just talk
Speaker 1: about Einstein for a second because I have a hypothesis
Speaker 1: that the kind of brain regions that enabled his superior
Speaker 1: reasoning was not the default mode network sort of social imagination.
Speaker 1: In fact, he might have even had a deficit in
Speaker 1: social autistic Yeah, exactly what I mean. So I'm thinking
Speaker 1: that it probably was his p fit or his parietal will.
Speaker 1: He probably had his paridal a little bit. And also
Speaker 1: I will say, one thing that I have in common
Speaker 1: with Einstein is the corpus corpus close thickness, early hair
Speaker 1: and yeah exactly. But yeah, it just dawns on me
Speaker 1: that I don't think that it was his like default
Speaker 1: mode network that was the key source of imagining what
Speaker 1: it would be like being on a light beam. That's
Speaker 1: such a non social thing to imagine it's a non
Speaker 1: social thing. But that is default mode activity, that that imagination,
Speaker 1: that imagination ability to put himself on that light beam
Speaker 1: into was it? Was it or was it visual spatial imagination?
Speaker 1: Certainly visual spatial imagination, But I think it's still default mode.
Speaker 1: Really it's mental simulation, it's mental time travel. I think
Speaker 1: I think it's default mode activity. But don't you find
Speaker 1: the kind of mental time travel coming from the defaultble
Speaker 1: network tens to have be things that are social in content,
Speaker 1: and content doesn't have to be social in contact. It
Speaker 1: can be social in contact, doesn't have to be social
Speaker 1: in contact. For people who are less social, the content
Speaker 1: will differ. So I think the content depends on the
Speaker 1: type of person it is an individual. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: looking at studies, and we're all looking at studies that
Speaker 1: involve normal undergraduates who are social by nature on the average.
Speaker 1: But I think if the person, the individual is less
Speaker 1: social or perhaps on the spectrum, that the content of
Speaker 1: their imagination is going to be more with things as
Speaker 1: opposed to people, and those things are going to be
Speaker 1: things like traveling on a light beam. There's so many
Speaker 1: reasons why that's interesting because it's like it's not like
Speaker 1: the brain activation is the causal thing. I mean like
Speaker 1: it's a reflection of the overall system of the organism.
Speaker 1: But sure, you know, to be able to say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: the reason why Einstein is the way he was is
Speaker 1: because his brain was activated. There. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: we don't have the default mode of a bunch of aspies.
Speaker 1: We should That would be kind of cool, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what would the default will of aspies be? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think it would be really I think that study would
Speaker 1: be fascinating. It would probably be less social content as
Speaker 1: opposed to the you know, weird people that we have
Speaker 1: Western educated, intelligent, rich and democratic and neurotypical neurotypical and
Speaker 1: neurotypical undergraduates. Yeah, yeah, well that would be we should
Speaker 1: definitely do that Study's that would be so cool. Okay,
Speaker 1: awake cranwgius. At the moment everyone's been waiting for weak creatomies.
Speaker 1: We've studied over one hundred individuals. I've done awake craniotomies
Speaker 1: with a neurosurgeon over one hundred individuals, and talk about
Speaker 1: individual differences. We open up the brain and do testing,
Speaker 1: neuropsychological testing while a patient is awake and while the
Speaker 1: tumor is being removed, and we want to make sure
Speaker 1: that the motor cortex isn't hurt, or language isn't hurt,
Speaker 1: or visual spatial organization or math ability isn't hurt while
Speaker 1: a patient is awake, and we're starting to look at
Speaker 1: non dominant hemisphere, which you know, neurosurgeons are not as
Speaker 1: interested in the quiet hemisphere or non eloquent hemisphere, the
Speaker 1: right hemisphere, but we know that prosody and some creative aspects,
Speaker 1: certainly nonverbal reasoning is organized in the right hemisphere. So
Speaker 1: we have in collaboration with a musical professor, we're looking
Speaker 1: at musical ability and non dominant language ability in the
Speaker 1: right hemic sphere during craniotomy as well. So it's a
Speaker 1: fascinating procedure. People at their most vulnerable people are there
Speaker 1: are extremely brave in doing this procedure to get the
Speaker 1: tumor out, and it's something that really is I think
Speaker 1: the culmination of my studies and individual differences at the
Speaker 1: level of an individual. Holy cow. So they're awake, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's credible. What does it feel like, well,
Speaker 1: your head's numb, so it's kind of like going to
Speaker 1: the dentist and you get all your teeth numbed up,
Speaker 1: so you feel your teeth all adrillne on it. So
Speaker 1: you can take your skull off and expose the brain,
Speaker 1: and then you put a little stimulator on the surface
Speaker 1: of the brain and you can temporarily shut off kind
Speaker 1: of like flipping the breakers on the back of the house,
Speaker 1: different circuits while patients are talking, and you can stop talking.
Speaker 1: Or you can have someone involuntarily move their limb by
Speaker 1: putting a stimulator on the surface so the brain and
Speaker 1: making the neurons work, or making the neurons stop working
Speaker 1: by putting a small electrical current through them while the
Speaker 1: patient is awake, and you can see which neurons are
Speaker 1: critical for the performance of that activity is language, for example,
Speaker 1: expressive language, receptive language, motor activity, any activity that you
Speaker 1: can localize in the brain, but we have to localize
Speaker 1: it in the individual brain because language is supposedly, as
Speaker 1: we learned in the textbook You and I Scott that
Speaker 1: broke his area is in the inferior frontal Low and
Speaker 1: Wernicke's areas in the superior posterior temporal lobe. Not always
Speaker 1: the case, right, not always the case. I mean it depends,
Speaker 1: and you can have little nodes that are distributed, distributed around.
Speaker 1: In one patient, reorganization that had occurred due to epilepsy,
Speaker 1: and kept stimulating and kept taking out Brookes area, and
Speaker 1: we ended up resecting the entirety of Brokers area. But
Speaker 1: the patient kept talking, talking, talking, so we knew everything
Speaker 1: was fine. Brokes area was somewhere different, so interesting, and
Speaker 1: yet you wouldn't be able to tell just talking to
Speaker 1: the person. No, they're like, oh, well, your Brokers area
Speaker 1: is no or imaging them because the blood flow, you know,
Speaker 1: is a really gross measure. And we love all these
Speaker 1: fMRI studies, but we forget that they're about blood flow,
Speaker 1: they're not about neurons. And so you get an estimate
Speaker 1: of the neurons that are underlying that work. But that's
Speaker 1: only an estimate, and so you really have to understand
Speaker 1: the actual neurons that are doing the work. If you're
Speaker 1: going to you're going to take them out for sure.
Speaker 1: How many people do wake craneometries around the world, I mean,
Speaker 1: is it a common practice? It is, It's been going
Speaker 1: on for the last hundred and well about one hundred years.
Speaker 1: Penfield Wilder Penfield started doing these at the beginning of
Speaker 1: last century. And Canada and every just about every state
Speaker 1: in a major medical center in the United States has
Speaker 1: a center to do away cranyonomies. New Mexico, being one
Speaker 1: of the smaller states, did not have one until we
Speaker 1: started that here more recently in the last three years,
Speaker 1: and now we have a viable center here. But you
Speaker 1: have one in Pennsylvania where you are, or and certainly
Speaker 1: New York has several in the hospitals up there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't trust a sadistic neuroscientists playing around with my oh,
Speaker 1: what like a puppet, right, like, oh, with strings, a
Speaker 1: puppet with strings. We could just you know, take this
Speaker 1: area and make him, you know, sing opera. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't work like that. We can't make you sing opera.
Speaker 1: It's not like hypnosis, like making you cluck like a
Speaker 1: chicken or something like that. That's good, yeah, but it is.
Speaker 1: It is fascinating to see what ongoing neural activities we
Speaker 1: can interrupt, what neural activities we can excite, mostly motor activity,
Speaker 1: and you can have sensory experiences by stimulating the homunculus
Speaker 1: and identifying the face area or the arm area or
Speaker 1: the leg area by going you know, right up the
Speaker 1: homunculus of the sensory or motor cortex, so you can
Speaker 1: see exactly where things are just as just as we
Speaker 1: see in the textbook. That is so amazing. Well, your
Speaker 1: whole career has spanned lots of really fascinating topics, and
Speaker 1: I just thank you so much for the work you've
Speaker 1: contributed to the field, to my own research, and thanks
Speaker 1: for you know, just your support of my work and
Speaker 1: my own quirkiness over the years too. Scott. I'm really
Speaker 1: happy to reconnect with you and hope we can stay
Speaker 1: connected likewise. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode
Speaker 1: of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in
Speaker 1: some way to something you heard, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a
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Speaker 1: next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.