Brain Rules for Baby (14 page)

I certainly believe in the concept of intelligence, and I think IQ and “g assess some aspect of it. So do many of my colleagues, who signed the 1997 editorial in the research journal
Intelligence
declaring that “IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes”. I agree. I just wish I knew what is actually being measured.

The variability of these IQ tests can be frustrating. Parents want to know if their kid is smart. And they want their kid to
be
smart. Given our knowledge-based 21st century economy, that makes sense. When you drill down on the subject, however, many parents really mean that they want their kids to be academically successful, which is a better guarantee of their future. Are smart and grade-point average related? They are, but they are not the same thing, and the link is not as strong as one might think.

Single numbers—or even correlations between single numbers—simply do not have enough flexibility to describe the many complexities of human intelligence. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, who published his latest theory of multiple intelligences in 1993, put it this way: “Strong evidence exists that the mind is a multi-faceted, multi-component instrument, which cannot in any legitimate way be captured in a single paper-and-pencil style instrument. Ready to cry uncle? Is intelligence going to be the province of comments like “I don’t know what it is, but I know when I see it”? No, but to see the issue more clearly, we are going to have to replace this one-number-fits-all notion.

Human intelligence is more like ingredients in a stew than numbers in a spreadsheet.

The smell of my mother’s beef stew simmering in the kitchen on a cold winter’s day is easily the best comfort-food memory I have. The crackling sounds of braised beef, the sweet, stinging smell of chopped onions, the delightful sight of quarter-sized medallions of carrots floating in a crockpot. Mom’s stew was like a warm hug in a bowl.

She once marched me into the kitchen to teach me how to make her famous beef stew. No easy task, for she had the annoying habit of changing the recipe almost every time she made it. “It depends on who’s coming over for dinner, Mom would explain, “or whatever we have lying around the house”. According to her, there were only two critical ingredients needed to pull off her masterpiece. One was the quality of the beef. The other was the quality of the roux (gravy) surrounding the meat. If those issues were settled, the stew was going to be a success, regardless of what else went into the pot.

Like Mom’s stew, human intelligence has two essential ingredients, both fundamentally linked to our evolutionary need to survive. One ingredient is the ability to record information. This is sometimes called “crystallized intelligence. It involves the various memory systems of the brain, which combine to create a richly structured database. The other ingredient is the capacity to adapt that information to unique situations. This involves the ability to improvise, based in part on the ability to recall and recombine specific parts of the database. This capacity for reasoning and problem solving is termed “fluid intelligence”. From an evolutionary perspective, the potent combination of memorization and extemporization conferred on us two survival-rich behaviors: the ability to learn rapidly from our mistakes and the ability to apply that learning in unique combinations to the ever-changing, ever-brutal world of our East African cradle.

Intelligence, seen through this evolutionary lens, is simply the ability to do these activities better than someone else.

Mandatory as the ingredients of memory and fluid intelligence are, though, they are not the entire recipe for human smarts. Just like my mother’s shifting recipe, different families have different combinations of talents stewing in their cerebral crockpots. One son might have a poor memory but dynamite quantitative skills. One daughter might display an extraordinary penchant for language yet remain mystified by even simple division. How can we say one child is less intelligent than the other?

Many other ingredients make up the human intelligence stew, and I’d like to describe five that I think you would do well to consider as you contemplate your child’s intellectual gifts. They are:

Most of these characteristics fall outside the spectrum of the usual IQ suspects. We believe many have genetic roots; most can be seen in newborns. Rooted as these five ingredients may be in our evolutionary history, however, they do not exist in isolation from the outside world. Nurture—even for Teddy Roosevelt—plays an important role in whether a child is able to maximize his or her intelligence.

This is one of my favorite examples of an infant’s desire to explore. I was attending the Presbyterian baptism of a 9-month-old. Things started out well enough. The infant was nestled quietly in his dad’s arms, waiting for his turn to be sprinkled in front of the congregation. As the parents turned to face the pastor, the baby spied the handheld microphone. He quickly tried to wrest the mike out of the pastor’s grip, flicking his tongue out at the ball of the microphone. The little
guy seemed to think that the mike was some kind of ice cream cone, and he decided to test his hypothesis.

This was highly inappropriate Presbyterian behavior. The pastor swung the microphone out of reach and immediately realized his mistake: Even in the preverbal crowd, hell hath no fury like a scientist denied his data. The baby howled, tried to wiggle free, and clawed at the microphone, all while licking at the air. He was exploring, darn it, and he did not appreciate being interrupted in the pursuit of knowledge. Especially if it involved sugar.

I’m not sure about the parents, but I was delighted to see such a fine example of pediatric research enthusiasm. Parents have known that children were natural scientists long before there were microphones. But it wasn’t until the last half of the 20th century that we could isolate components of their wonderful exploratory behaviors.

Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They experience sensory observations, make predictions about what they observe, design and deploy experiments capable of testing their predictions, evaluate their tests, and add that knowledge to a self-generated, growing database. The style is naturally aggressive, wonderfully flexible, and annoyingly persistent. They use fluid intelligence to extract information, then crystallize it into memory. Nobody teaches infants how to do this, yet they do it all over the world. This hints at the behavior’s strong evolutionary roots. They are
scientists,
as their parents suspected all along. And their laboratory is the whole world, including microphones in church.

 

Exploratory behavior—the willingness to experiment, to ask extraordinary questions of ordinary things—is a talent highly prized in the working world, too. Good ideas tend to make money. The trait seems to be as valuable a survival strategy today as it was on the plains of the Serengeti.

What traits separate creative, visionary people who consistently conjure up financially successful ideas from less imaginative, managerial types who carry them out? Two business researchers explored that simple question. They conducted a whopping six-year study with more than 3,000 innovative executives, from chemists to software engineers. After being published in 2009, the study won an award from
Harvard Business Review.

Visionaries had in common five characteristics, which the researchers termed “Innovator’s DNA.” Here are the first three:

The biggest common denominator of these characteristics? A willingness to explore. The biggest enemy was the non-exploration- oriented system in which the innovators often found themselves. Hal Gregersen, one of the lead authors of the study, said in
Harvard Business Review:
“You can summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in
one word: ‘inquisitiveness. I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator”. He then went on to talk about children:

“If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions. But by the time they are 6 ½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they’re grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them. Eighty percent of executives spend less than 20 percent of their time on discovering new ideas”.

That’s a heartbreaker. Why we’ve designed our schools and workplaces this way has never made sense to me. But there are things that you, as a parent, can do to encourage your child’s natural desire to explore—starting with understanding how inquisitiveness contributes to your child’s intellectual success.

A healthy, well-adjusted preschooler sits down at a table in front of two giant, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. It’s not a kitchen table—it’s Walter Mischel’s Stanford lab during the late 1960s. The smell is heavenly. “You see these cookies?” Mischel says. “You can eat just one of them right now if you want, but if you wait, you can eat both. I have to go away for five minutes. If I return and you have not eaten anything, I will let you have
both
cookies. If you eat one while I’m gone, the bargain is off and you don’t get the second one. Do we have a deal?” The child nods. The researcher leaves.

What does the child do? Mischel has the most charming, funny films of children’s reactions. They squirm in their seat. They turn their back to the cookies (or marshmallows or other assorted caloric confections, depending on the day). They sit on their hands. They close one eye, then both, then sneak a peek. They are trying to get both cookies, but the going is tough. If the children are kindergartners,
72 percent cave in and gobble up the cookie. If they’re in fourth grade, however, only 49 percent yield to the temptation. By sixth grade, the number is 38 percent, about half the rate of the preschoolers.

Welcome to the interesting world of impulse control. It is part of a suite of behaviors under the collective term executive function. Executive function controls planning, foresight, problem solving, and goal setting. It engages many parts of the brain, including a short-term form of memory called working memory. Mischel and his many colleagues discovered that a child’s executive function is a critical component of intellectual prowess.

We now know that it is actually a
better
predictor of academic success than IQ. It’s not a small difference, either: Mischel found that children who could delay gratification for 15 minutes scored 210 points higher on their SATs than children who lasted one minute.

Why? Executive function relies on a child’s ability to filter out distracting (in this case, tempting) thoughts, which is critical in environments that are oversaturated with sensory stimuli and myriad on-demand choices. That’s our world, as you have undoubtedly noticed, and it will be your children’s, too. Once the brain has chosen relevant stimuli from a noisy pile of irrelevant choices, executive function allows the brain to stay on task and say no to unproductive distractions.

At the neurobiological level, self-control comes from “common value signals” (measures of neural activity) generated by a specific area of the brain behind your forehead. It is called—brain jargon alert—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Another area of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, throws out bolts of electricity to this ventromedial cousin. The more practice a child has in delaying gratification, the better aimed the jolt becomes, and the more control it can exert over behavior. Researchers originally discovered this
while having diet-conscious adults look at pictures of carrots, then switching the picture to candy bars. Their brains exerted powerful “I-don’t-care-if-it’s-sugar-you-can’t-have-any” signals when the chocolate appeared.

A child’s brain can be trained to enhance self-control and other aspects of executive function. But genes are undoubtedly involved. There seems to be an innate schedule of development, which explains why the cookie experiment shows a difference in scores between kindergartners and sixth graders. Some kids display the behaviors earlier, some later. Some struggle with it their entire lives. It’s one more way every brain is wired differently. But children who are able to filter out distractions, the data show, do far better in school.