Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Can We Increase Our Intelligence? - NYTimes.com

We'll be writing about slow and fast forces that shape the brain: natural selection, operating relatively slowly over many generations; and environmental influences, whose effects are visible across a few generations or even within one individual's lifetime.

We're often asked whether the human brain is still evolving. Taken at face value, it sounds like a silly question. People are animals, so selection pressure would presumably continue to apply across generations.

But the questioners are really concerned about a larger issue: how our brains are changing over time — and whether we have any control over these developments. This week we discuss intelligence and the "Flynn effect," a phenomenon that is too rapid to be explained by natural selection.

It used to be believed that people had a level of general intelligence with which they were born that was unaffected by environment and stayed the same, more or less, throughout life. But now it's known that environmental influences are large enough to have considerable effects on intelligence, perhaps even during your own lifetime.

More ...

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/guest-column-can-we-increase-our-intelligence/?th&emc=th