March 30, 2006

"This is the first time that anyone has shown that the brain grows differently in extremely intelligent children."

Okay, all you narcissistic parents: Time to run out and get a brain image done on your little genius. And all you IQ doubters: Time to fret about a future of imaging and classifying our young brain-containers.

6 comments:

Robert said...

Wow, nobody wants to bite on this one.

I'm not surprised, personally. Thinking is focused on the brain. The brain is an organ. Physical differences in organs are going to have real effects.

Ann Althouse said...

"Wow, nobody wants to bite on this one." ... "This comment thread is empty..."

I forgot to add the gay element! That's all people want to talk about.

MadisonMan said...

Yes, please find the story about different brain growth in children who become gay. Then we'll talk!

I'm mystified why a parent would subject a child to an mri. Wait for 25 years when the health impacts of them become known! (Half kidding, I think). Ditto with all those ultrasounds -- are we so sure those sound waves are benign?

SippicanCottage said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Balfegor said...

Well, I'm not a parent and while I have doubts about IQ as a direct measure, I'm rather less skeptical about G, which is fairly highly correlated with IQ (or so I, as a layman, understand).

On the other hand, this is not all that surprising to me. My recollection is that children who grow up multilingual have been found to reap measurable cognitive benefits, but their initial language acquisition period is prolonged. So the idea that there may be developmental differences connected with cognitive differences later on down the road is not unexpected.

Balfegor said...

And getting away from the subject of race, differences based on DNA in general (and gender?) will be obviated as well. Is it a good thing that some people aren't born with as much potential for intelligence as others? I don't see what's so great about that, unless we want to have a subclass to do menial tasks.

Well, some people think that's one of the plusses of illegal immigration. I favour the army of robot slaves myself, although if the Japanese don't get cracking on those robot slaves soon, they're going to have to make do with cheap immigrant labourers the way Western countries do.