WHAT IS PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE?

ACCORDING TO A WIDELY CIRCULATED STORY that quickly became an Internet parable— or ossibly a legend—a bricklayer had injured himself while working on a repair project at the top of a low-rise building. On his claim form for medical insurance, he tried to minimize the incident by answering the question,“What caused the accident?” with the brief response, “Faulty judgment.”When pressed by the company’s claims department for a full and detailed description of the accident, he related a tale that could indeed tempt the casual reader to question his common sense. According to his account of the incident, he had been repairing a brick chimney on the roof of an older four-story building.When he finished, he still had a large number of unused bricks and needed to get them back down to the ground. Not wanting to make many trips up and down the service stairwell, he decided to rig a rope and pulley system to lower the bricks to the ground. Spotting a pulley mounted on an existing beam that extended over the edge of the roof, he chose a wooden barrel as a container for the bricks. He passed a rope through the pulley, attached one end to the barrel, and threw the other end down to the ground.Then he went down and attached the bottom end of the rope firmly to a cleat mounted on the wall. Next he went back up, hung the empty barrel over the side of the wall, and proceeded to fill it with bricks. When it was full, he went down and proceeded to lower it to the ground. He wrapped the end of the rope securely around his hand and then released the rope from the cleat.Too late, he realized that the barrel of bricks weighed a lot more than he did. He suddenly shot upward, hanging onto the rope, as the barrel rapidly descended. He met the barrel on its downward trajectory, getting severely bruised in the process.As he arrived at the pulley, the barrel hit the ground. Unfortunately, the weight of the bricks tore the bottom out
of the barrel, which—now empty—weighed much less than he did. Now the barrel shot upward as he descended rapidly, still attached to the rope. He met the barrel a second time, sustaining additional bruises. He hit the ground as the barrel hit the pulley. By then, he had become disentangled from the end of the rope and, as he lay on the pile of bricks looking upward, he saw the barrel on its third trip, now 40 Practical Intelligence heading straight for him. Before he could get up and move out of the way, the barrel landed on him, inflicting a final humiliating insult. No, it’s not inhuman to laugh at this incident; we’re laughing at the human condition, not the condition of any one human. If you have guilt feelings about laughing at the slapstick nature of the incident, just imagine that it might not be true. But . . . we all know that it could be true, don’t we? There’s something primal and archetypal about incidents like these. They’re the stuff of comedy, cartoons, and jokes. Failure of common sense is a common theme in theater, movies, and even songs. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we’ve all had similar lapses of “common sense.” My neighbor’s teen-age son, while drilling a hole in the fender of his bicycle to mount a headlight, vigorously drilled down through the metal fender and straight into the front tire. It’s a necessary part of the experience of being a teen-ager—it comes with the territory. I’m a fan of definitions; I often find that I can clarify my understanding of an issue, a topic, or a concept if I can frame it succinctly into a concise definition. And sometimes trying a variety of definitions helps us understand a concept from multiple angles. What counts as practical intelligence, common sense, or wisdom depends on the context in which we hope to find it. It’s situational. A person might be wise in the ways of business, but not at all wise in his or her dealings with fellow human beings. Someone might be considered wise in the practice of some scientific specialty, but not wise in managing his or her personal finances. Practical intelligence, perhaps more than the other intelligences in the MI framework, needs a view through a wide-angle lens. It incorporates a wide range of mental processes, skills, and habits.We understand that it isn’t “IQ,” and in fact that it’s more than IQ, but:What is it? Moving on from this simple definition, we begin a fairly broad investigation of human mental competence, in its many dimensions.

THINKING IS A BODILY FUNCTION

How many of your best ideas have come to you in the shower? While brushing your teeth? While walking or jogging? How often have you experienced strange, surreal, and creative images flowing through your mind as you were falling asleep or coming out of sleep? Have you had an important idea or a realization come to you in a dream, or while daydreaming? Has the solution to a problem flashed into your mind while you were doing something completely unrelated to the problem? The very first principle of practical intelligence to be understood is that you think with your whole body, not with some individual circuit somewhere in the cortex of your brain. In fact, your brain is not really a whole computer—it’s one key part of an extended computer, your biocomputer, which includes your whole nervous system, various information-processing subsystems located in your organs and muscles, and even your chemical messenger systems such as your hormone systems and your immune system. Case in point: controlled clinical studies have shown that, immediately after test subjects meditated for as little as fifteen minutes, concentrations of an immune-system chemical known as Immunoglobulin A (IgA) in their saliva registered significantly higher than before meditation. These changes were not observed when the subjects merely rested or slept.The particular nature of any mental activity potentially has a corresponding physiological impact on the body. Case in point: controlled clinical studies have also shown that listening to counter-classical types of music such as hard rock, grunge, rap, and other strident acoustical patterns induced a significant drop in salivary IgA levels.Working in very high-noise environments tends to have the same debilitating effects on immune function. In Chapter 5 we’ll explore further the effects of environmental stressors on mental health and wellness and discover some strategies for managing our sensory environment and filtering out a major part of the toxic input. Clearly, mental activity of any kind is expressed throughout the body, down to the level of individual cells. In some sense, we can even say that the cells themselves have intelligence—they “think” at a microscopic level. Certainly the individual organs do. A mountain of scientific and anecdotal evidence supports the conclusion that mental activity can make a person sick or well, a point we hardly need debate here. The emerging scientific field of psychoneuroimmunology reports astonishing instances of remission of cancer and recovery from a host of diseases using meditation, intensive imaging, and even prayer, where conventional medical treatment strategies have failed. A thought—any thought— is a whole-body event. It might arise from within an organ, say with a change in blood glucose level, which you sense as a changed feeling, or mood.That change in mood will have a subtle—or significant—effect on the conscious aspect of your mental process, which is only a part of the whole of what you’re “thinking” about. What you decide, what you say, and how you perceive what’s going on around you are all moderated by these bio-information events that are constantly flashing throughout your body.Your brain is usually involved, but may not necessarily be controlling the process.What we think of as “moods,” for example, are actually bio- informational states that pervade the body. You think—in the broadest sense of the term—even while you’re sleeping. Even in the deepest level of sleep, classified as Stage 4 sleep, you can still respond to signals from your environment. How does a sleeping mother’s biocomputer tune out traffic noises, barking dogs, and a snoring mate, and yet wake her instantly when her infant cries? What enables you to wake up five minutes before your alarm goes off? Sleep researchers report incidents of lucid dreaming, a dream state in which the dreamer somehow “knows” that he or she is dreaming. This seems to be a paradoxical state of consciousness that incorporates aspects of waking thought and vivid dream images. Every one of those countless thought-events that continually flash through our bodies makes us a different person—physiologically, psychologically, and informationally.We may be conscious and aware of some of these bio-informational events, which we specifically refer to as “thoughts,” only vaguely aware of others, and incapable of experiencing others at a conscious level. Nevertheless, we’re continuously “thinking.”

MEET YOUR BIOCOMPUTER

Imagine building a computer that can store a hundred years’ or more worth of information; analyze and seamlessly combine multi-media data—images, sounds, numbers, words, and even sensations and smells; recognize and recall complex patterns; generate its own data from scratch; and even write its own software. Make it able to control complex mechanical, electrical, and chemical processes equivalent to those of a small factory, and make sure it can connect instantly to any of billions of others like it. Make it portable, keep it smaller than a fair-sized grapefruit, keep its weight under about three pounds, make it operate with no battery and no cooling fan, on less power than a twenty-five watt bulb, and you have something like the human brain. Your brain. It’s the most advanced biological structure found anywhere in nature. Have you ever considered what a phenomenal gift you have in this biological computer? Let’s take a closer look at this remarkable system and understand more fully the potential it offers for living more intelligently and joyfully. Referring to Figure 3.1, we see the general physical structure of the brain and spinal cord, which form the central processor and the primary communication axis for the whole extended biocomputer. Although not visible in the simplified diagram, your brain floats inside a shockproof vault—your cranium. Three layers of tough tissue, the meninges, protect it and cushion it from bouncing against your skull. It’s the best-protected organ in your body, and it enjoys the highest priority when blood, oxygen, and nutrients are distributed. It produces and floats in its own cerebro-spinal fluid, which circulates nutrients and flows downward to the body, carrying waste products with it.

Figure 3.1. Architecture of the Brain
Also not shown in the diagram is the whole system of arteries and veins, which supply the brain with blood. The absence of a properly oxygenated blood supply to the brain for longer than about four minutes usually causes irreversible brain damage or death. Your brain consumes about 20 percent of your body’s glucose supply and a similar amount of its oxygen. It burns energy at a rate about equal to a twenty-five-watt bulb. (We’ll fore go the obvious jokes about people whose bulbs are dimmer than others.)

Hemispheres, Lobes, and Functions

At first glance, one notices that the outer portion of the brain is partitioned fore-and-aft into left and right halves, or cerebral hemispheres.Your two hemispheres are physically separate, but they’re joined by a thick band of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum (“callous body” in Latin),
as illustrated by the interior view in the figure. The corpus callosum carries signals back and forth between the hemispheres, enabling them to share information constantly. The outer part of your brain’s convoluted surface—the cortex—is demarcated by deep fissures, each referred to by scientists as a sulcus (collectively, sulci), separating various mounds or ridges, each referred
to as a gyrus (collectively, gyri). This sulcus-and-gyrus formation tends to maximize the surface area of the gray matter of the cortex, where the billions of neurons do the heavy work in our thinking processes. It’s also well known that the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. Similarly, the sensory signals coming to the brain from the two sides of your body cross over to the opposite hemispheres, where they’re processed. Rather peculiarly, your visual neurons, which emerge from the retinas of your eyes, are segmented into left and right “fields.”That is, the nerves from the left half of your left retina and the left half of your right retina both go to your right hemisphere’s visual processing center, located in the occipital lobe at the rear of your brain. Similarly, the nerves from the right half of each retina go to the visual center in the occipital lobe of your left hemisphere. The optic nerves, which emerge from the back of each eyeball, fuse together into a junction called the optic chiasm, and immediately separate again, with each outgoing nerve branch switching over to the opposite hemisphere. This “crossover” effect, in which motor control and sensory processing are swapped between the two sides of the body and the two cerebral hemispheres, remains a mystery to scientists. The functional value of this design feature is open to speculation. Much of what we know about the functions of the brain comes from the study of brain-injured people. Scientists and physicians have long associated various cognitive, behavioral, and motor impairments with specific traumas to the brain and nervous system. Conversely, they can often diagnose specific brain injuries by testing for impairment of these specific functions. Incidentally, your brain cannot directly perceive the effects of trauma to itself. It has no sensory nerves of its own.
Amid the convolution of visible blobs and crevices on the surface of each hemisphere, one can discern four general subdivisions or lobes: the frontal lobe, which sits just behind your forehead; the temporal lobe, located on the side; the parietal lobe, which spans across the top of your brain; and the occipital lobe, located in the back of your skull. Each lobe is responsible for certain specific aspects of the thinking process.The left and right hemispheres each have the same four lobes, although the assignment of the functions differs somewhat between the two. Between any two people, these functional divisions of activity are very similar, although certain areas can vary somewhat from person to person.Two functional areas that seem to vary somewhat from person to person are the speech and language centers. For about 70 to 95 percent of us, these functions probably reside in the left hemisphere, as illustrated in the figure. Slightly above and behind your left ear, Wernicke’s area, named after German scientist Carl Wernicke (in science, you get to name a part of the body after yourself if you’re the first to discover it) handles the complex process of encoding ideas into language and interpreting the meaning of incoming verbal information. Just forward of your left ear, Broca’s area (named after French scientist Paul Broca)
controls your vocal apparatus. These two centers must work together closely for you to understand and use language. “Handedness”—the preference for using either the left or right
hand—is also not so simple as one might first think. Early researchers believed that handedness and speech were mostly contra-lateral—right-handers had their speech centers in their left hemispheres, so therefore left-handers must carry speech in their right hemispheres. More recent research indicates that left-handers are not simply the opposites— cranially speaking—of right-handers. Apparently, some of them are right-brained for language and some are not. Ambidextrous people complicate the question even further. It’s difficult for scientists to settle this question, because it would require opening up the skulls of large number of people and probing their brains—not a very humane approach to research. Your brain receives information from the various parts of your body and sends back instructions of various kinds by means of twelve pairs of cranial nerves, or nerve bundles (not shown in the figure), which emerge from the base of your skull and plug into your spinal cord. Each cranial nerve coordinates a particular collection of functions. Some of them only transmit information to the brain—the sensory nerves; some only transmit commands from the brain—the motor nerves; and some do both. The neurons you have over two hundred different kinds of them in your cortex, stacked in six layers—are specialized cells that seem to be designed to communicate with one another and with other cells in the body. A typical neuron has a blob-like central body with thousands of thread like receiving connections, or dendrites. Branching out from the cell body is a long tail, or axon, with a fatty myelin sheath, from which radiate many other outgoing connectors called axon terminals. These axons and their terminals make up the thick, fatty structure known as the white matter of the brain. Brain tissue, overall, is highly concentrated in fat, and people in certain cultures consider various animal brains a culinary delicacy. Each neuron receives information through its dendrites and passes it on through its axon terminals.These axons can vary in overall length from a small fraction of an inch to several feet. Unlike other body cells, neurons cannot replace themselves, with a few interesting exceptions. Neurons are continually flashing pulses to one another, at speeds of about two hundred miles per hour. The astronomical number of these potential neuron-to-neuron connections makes it possible for the brain to store vast amounts of information.The well-known brainwaves, measured by the electroencephalograph, portray a kind of electrical “music” created by the simultaneous, rhythmic firing of millions of neurons. Actually, neurons only account for about 10 percent of your brain’s cell count. There’s another type of cell, the much more abundant glial cell (from the Latin word meaning “glue”), which doesn’t carry nerve impulses,but supports the neurons in many ways. Scientists have previously thought of glial cells as a kind of passive “pudding” that surrounds and supports the neurons. New findings, however, suggest that the glial cells communicate chemically with one another, and may act in concert to help transmit information throughout the brain.They also transport nutrients, digest the bodies of dead neurons, guide the development of neurons in infancy, and manufacture the fatty myelin, which surrounds the axons of the neurons. The part of the brain we’ve been seeing from the outside—the cerebrum—is just one of three main divisions that reflect the evolutionary history of human development. This so-called cortex of the brain (from the Latin word meaning “tree bark”) is the most recent of the three primary structures, and it’s what makes us essentially human. The three primary brain structures are sometimes labeled the basal region, the mid-brain, and the cerebral cortex. (Note: scientists differ somewhat in the use of these labels and subdivisions, but these three seem to represent the most widely accepted architecture.)

The Basal Region: Your Reptilian Brain

At the basal region of your brain, your spinal cord enlarges to form the medulla blongata, and above it a bulbous structure called the pons, two structures that regulate and control the most primitive aspects of life: breathing, heartbeat, arousal, and primary motor control.This portion of the system is sometimes called the brainstem, considered by scientists to be the most ancient part of the brain, evolutionarily speaking.We share this primary type of structure with reptiles, birds, and probably with the dinosaurs. Your spinal cord itself is a miniature computer of sorts, where some primitive processes are controlled by in-built spinal reflexes.These include the familiar patellar knee jerk, which the physician tests with a little hammer, and automatic recoil responses to sharp pain, heat, or cold.When you put your weight on your feet as you get out of bed or rise from a chair, your spinal reflexes automatically activate the muscles that raise the arches of your feet so that they will support you properly. This stretch reflex is a in built spinal feature that serves most of the muscles in your body. Sexual orgasm also qualifies as a spinal reflex, although it is mediated in complex ways by cortical activity and a dozen or more hormones and neurotransmitters. At this basal level, various other specialized structures control your autonomic, or involuntary, functions, such as hunger, thirst, sleep and wakefulness, sexual drives, various organ processes, blood pressure, and the general level of activity of your entire nervous system. The pupillary reflex—the automatic dilation and constriction of the pupils of your eyes in response to light—is a fairly reliable indicator of these autonomic functions, which emergency medical workers test to assess for brain injury. Curiously, the processes of falling asleep and waking up are not controlled by the main regions of the brain, but rather by a small patch of cells in the brainstem known as the reticular activating system (RAS). By means not yet well understood, the RAS apparently “turns on” your cortex as you wake up and figuratively turns it off to put you to sleep. Although we can resist falling asleep, it’s well proven that a human being cannot voluntarily stay awake indefinitely. General anesthetics typically work their effects on the RAS.While the RAS doesn’t “cause” consciousness, it seems to be necessary for conscious mental activity to occur. It may also be implicated in attention deficit disorder, and possibly hyperactivity disorder. The brainstem contains specialized cells that secrete neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that enable the neurons to communicate with one another.These include serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine, and a number of others.The relative concentrations of these messenger molecules in the brain tends to reflect the current state of brain activity. Some researchers claim that romantic infatuation, for example, is signaled by an increased concentration of dopamine (hence the name). This same basal region has another special structure that easily qualifies as a computer—or at least a sub-computer—in its own right. This is the cerebellum, a plum-sized blob of special nerve tissue that handles your habitual motor functions, such as balance and coordination, walking, routine hand and arm movements, speech, eye movements, and other well-learned motor processes such as a golf swing or tennis serve, typing into your computer, or dancing. The cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”) is also divided into left and right hemispheres. Its neurons, known as granule cells, are very tiny, and while it occupies only about 10 percent of your brain’s volume, your cerebellum has nearly 50 percent of all the neurons in your brain. It receives about two hundred million input fibers, compared to, say, the optic nerve, which contains about one million fibers. It’s the job of the cerebellum to reduce the information-processing load on the cerebral cortex, freeing it for more abstract mental activity. Although the motor control region of the cortex can send commands to various muscles throughout the body, it typically delegates responsibility to the cerebellum for “over-learned” activities that become “second nature.” As you learn any new motor activity, such as writing, singing a song, or reciting multiplication tables, your cerebellum tunes in to the neural activity in your cortex and begins to mimic the patterns in its own neurons. After a number of repetitions, the cerebellum has recorded a script of sorts, which it can call on to control the activity itself. Once the function has been fully learned, the cerebellum takes over control and it actually becomes difficult for the cortex to over ride it. As an experiment, try to take over conscious control of the process of walking across the room or up a flight of stairs. Note how the cerebellar auto-pilot seems to operate almost independently of your effort, making it very difficult to control it by conscious intention.These learned scripts actually account for a large proportion of your brain’s activity.

The Mid-Brain: Your Auto-Pilot

From the basal region, nerve channels branch out to the mid-brain region, which has a set of secondary control systems. Scientists also refer to this collection of structures as the limbic system. The mid-brain area produces various hormones, or “messenger molecules.” These include such hormones as the pituitary gland’s growth hormone and activating chemicals that cause your adrenal glands to secrete the excitatory hormone familiarly known as adrenalin. Other structures stimulate your thyroid gland to secrete thyroxin, which controls the overall pace of your body’s cellular combustion processes, better known as your metabolism. The pituitary, or hypophysis, is a busy little gland. About the size of a pea, it sits in its own private chamber, a small cavity hollowed into the bony brainpan, just above the roof of your mouth. Even this tiny brain structure is further divided fore-and-aft into two lobes, an anterior lobe and a posterior lobe. Operating largely under the supervision of the hypothalamus, the pituitary helps to regulate blood pressure; water retention; thyroid gland function; certain aspects of sexual function; aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation; overall body growth and size; and the conversion of food into energy. Other components in this limbic or mid-brain system include your thalamus, which serves as the central collection point for almost all sensory data going up to your cortex.The single exception to this thalamic centralization of data is the olfactory data, or the sense of smell, which goes directly to its own processing center in the cortex. The sense of smell is so ancient, evolutionarily speaking, that the olfactory nerves pass upward from the sinuses, through the cribiform plate—the floor of the brainpan—and into the olfactory bulb, a sensory sub-computer that sends its data directly to a special processing area of the cortex. The hypothalamus mediates arousal and emotion (and supervises the pituitary).The hippocampus plays a part in transforming short term memory into long-term memory. A nearby structure, the amygdala, serves as an early warning sensor, detecting patterns in the incoming stream of sensory data that might imply threats to your survival or well-being. Many neuroscientists believe that this constellation of structures in the limbic system, probably coordinated by the hypothalamus, plays a part in psychosomatic illness and psychosomatic healing. By some yet undiscovered process, it seems that the hypothalamus and its partners transform our various levels of conscious and non-conscious ideation into direct physiological consequences, as we’ll explore in more detail in a later chapter. As we’ll learn further, the developing field of psychoneuroimmunology seeks to understand the causative connections between conscious mental activity and immune function, as mediated through these primitive, non-conscious processes.

The Cortex: Your Mental Pilot

The third, and evolutionarily highest, level of your brain’s hierarchy is the cerebral cortex. This region manages the more complex, abstract, relational, and consciously experienced mental processes. It interacts constantly and intimately with the other two levels, as previously described. As we’ve already noted, thinking is not merely a whole brain function—it’s a whole body function. Almost all of the body’s processes, and particularly those processes we refer to as thinking, intertwine closely with the other processes. To illustrate the closely integrated nature of these various brain and body elements, consider the experience of explaining a complicated idea in a conversation.You must begin by forming the concept in your mind; then you find the words to express it; then you switch on your speech apparatus; you modulate the pitch, rate, and volume of your voice to convey the nonverbal meaning; you may make facial expressions or hand gestures to punctuate your message; you study the other person’s reactions for cues that tell you how well you’re getting through; and you sense the emotional tone—the “feeling”—of the situation. Your own emotional and non-conscious responses register your reactions to the situation, and to whatever the other person may be saying. Another familiar experience of the close integration of these brain regions is the so-called “fight-or-flight” reaction, which mobilizes your body in response to a stressful event. The conscious mental activity triggers automatic routines in the limbic or mid-brain region, which in turn mobilize various primitive responses in the basal region. Your whole-body response to a sudden provocation, or to a chronic experience of stress, forms a well-orchestrated syndrome, in which many parts of your biocomputer participate. There is probably much more about the cortex that is yet to be learned than that which we know.We still understand very little about how the brain dreams or why it dreams.We still have no robust theory of how the brain stores its memories. And of course, the entire notion of consciousness remains largely a mystery to neuroscientists.