The Brain and Intelligence

Human intelligence is an elusive quality. We all think we know it when we see it but try to pin down that quality to a firm, testable definition and suddenly, even for the most experienced researchers, the concept disappears. But now a team of British and German scientists believe they have firmly nailed down at least part of the notion of intelligence. They claim to have found a location for intelligence, whatever it is, in the brain.

For many years researchers have believed that intelligence is a quality which is spread throughout the whole human brain. Traditional psychologists such as Benjamin Martin believe that this accounts for incidences where physical damage to the brain need not affect intelligence at all. By using advanced scanning equipment, however, researchers led by John Duncan of the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge now think that it is much more localised and at the front of the brain in particular.

Duncan and his team have attempted to link intelligence to the activity of nerve cells in the brain by giving subjects a series of problem solving tests. These tests are of the standard sort used to test and measure intelligence. They resemble puzzles where sequences of numbers or letters have to be rearranged or continued, or patterns of shapes have to be inverted. While subjects are carrying out these intelligence tasks, their heads are scanned to see where electrical activity and blood flow in the brain are concentrated. It turns out that activity was concentrated in the frontal cortex and so, Duncan and his team presume, intelligence is situated there too.

This new idea has not been met with universal acceptance, however. The usual definition of "intelligence" was set by Charles Spearman 100 years ago. This was the quality that allows some people to be very good at a whole variety of things - music, mathematics, practical problem solving and so on - while others are not. He called this quality general intelligence or the "g" factor for short. It was a contentious idea even at the time but still no-one has come up with a better definition. Nonetheless, because the notion of intelligence is imprecisely defined, the idea that there is a fixed location for intelligence has to be questioned. The questioning comes in an article in the prestigious journal Science, the same edition as Duncan's own article. Yale psychologist Robert Stemberg points out that many people, who are clearly intelligent, such as leading politicians and lawyers, do very badly in intelligence tests. Conversely, one might argue, there are plenty of academics who are good at intelligence tests but who cannot even tie their own shoe laces! Sternberg implies that the idea, that being a successful politician or lawyer does not require intelligence, flies in the face of reason. Rather more likely is the idea that so-called intelligence tests can have little to do with many practical manifestations of intelligence. The skills of verbal and mathematical analysis measured by these tests can tell us very little about the skills of social interaction and people handling which are equally essential for success and are, therefore, equally valid qualities of intelligence.

Sternberg makes a further criticism of the conclusions drawn by Duncan's team. The mental-atlas approach really does not tell us anything about intelligence. The fact that we know a computer's "intelligence" is produced by a computer chip and that we can say where this chip is, does not tell us anything about the computer's intelligence or ability. We could easily move the location of the chip and this would not change the computer's "intelligence". As Benjamin Martin points out, this may be what happens in reality when following physical damage to one area of the brain, knowledge and ability appear able to relocate.

Questions 1-8

A. Classify the following statements as referring to

1. John Duncan

2. Charles Spearman

3. Benjamin Martin

4. Robert Steinberg

5. The writer of the article

B. Write the appropriate letters in boxes 1 - 7 on your answer sheet.

Example Answer

Physical damage to the brain need not affect intelligence. C

1. Intelligence can be located throughout the brain.

2. Intelligence makes you good at many different things.

3. Intelligence tests examine limited skills.

4. Intelligence is located at the front of the brain.

5. It is difficult to describe what intelligence is.

6. Intelligence tests can be bad at measuring the intellect of professionals.

7. Intelligence and other abilities can reposition following injury to the brain.

8. Intelligence is a characteristic required by those doing well in legal and political professions.

Questions 9 - 13

C. Using information contained in the text, complete the following sentences using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

9. Spearman's suggested that intelligence was the ability to be good at……….. .

10. The idea that all politicians and lawyers are unintelligent is ……… .

11. Spearman's ideas about intelligence are not ……………………… .

12. Sternberg suggests that in addition to academic ability, intelligence includes …..……..….. .

13. Sternberg also believes that intelligence is not affected by where ……………..… .

6. SPEAKING

The following questions may be recommended for a round table discussion.

1. What innate qualities does the system of education at your school / college / university develop?

2. How do you think people should be selected for universities?

3. What are the main principles on which teaching should be based?

4. What modern conditions allow a person to become educated and cultured? What is meant to be educated and cultured?

5. What is more important for good education – learning power or good teaching? Why?

6. What methods of education do you find too ‘traditional’ or too ‘progressive?’

7. Are there age limitations for education? Do you think we can be too old to learn certain things? What? Why?

8. Would you think of the subjects that will be taught at higher educational institutions in a few decades?

9. Knowledge acquisition: is it passive memorizing or active learning?

10. Do you agree that university education teaches you to think for yourself? Why? / Why not?

• ESSENTIAL VOCABULARY

This is a list of the Thematic Vocabulary for you to remember and effectively use in the classroom and outside.

1. to set targets

2. time management

3. to turn up for lectures and seminars

4. to be a paragon of academic virtue

5. to stick assiduously to a well-defined, realistic plan

6. to plagiarise, plagiarism

7. to be spontaneous and open-minded

8. to condense the information onto separate sheets of paper for quick access

9. to strike the right balance between working and enjoying oneself

10. to get to grips with fundamental ideas

11. to be mystified by the syllabus or assignments

12. to volunteer for things you have a flair for

13. to be married with

14. to reinforce one’s understanding and memory of the lecture

15. to run out of enjoyment and enthusiasm

16. to have the stomach for the job

17. to enhance thinking styles

18. mismatch in teaching and learning styles

19. to be locked into one profile

20. to emulate the role models at different points in our life

21. to seem dangerously elusive and intangible

22. to toss around conflicting ideas

23. a bewildering array of interpretations

24. to develop an abbreviated style of note taking

25. a complement to listening to the lecture

26. to budget sufficient time for doing smth

27. to underestimate the students’ abilities and accomplishments

28. traditional and non-traditional classroom setting

29. to use the language appropriately, accurately, fluently and effectively

30. to take a random approach to problems

31. to defy (to follow) conventions

32. to receive more favourable evaluations

33. to predict school performance

34. many facets of cognition

35. to differ in the particular intelligence profile

36. to encompass all the skills

37. to establish rapport in the classroom

• GLOSSARY

This is an alphabetical list of terms to be internalized by a pre-service teacher. It may come handy while tailoring a lesson or elaborating some activity.

Accuracy- The ability to produce language in an grammatically correct way. Compare fluency.

Activity - A short task which is part of a lesson, perhaps lasting 15-20 minutes. Synonymous here with a task.

Aims - The behavioural objectives of a lesson (e.g. The learners will be able to order tickets for a film over the telephone.)

Authentic materials - Texts from real-life sources (e.g. magazine articles, original cassette recordings) originally intended for native speakers.

Body language - Non-verbal communication. The way someone communicates a message with their body (e.g. by eye contact, facial expression, gestures, posture).

Brainstorm - To collect together ideas very quickly, without judging whether the ideas are good or not. Also a brainstorm.

Classroom management - The way a teacher organises her classroom and learners (e.g. how the furniture is organised, when to start and stop activities).

Cloze - A technique used commonly in teaching reading and listening, where words are removed from a text and replaced by gaps. The learners then fill in the gaps.

Communicative language teaching - The goal of this teaching method is communication, both in the classroom and in real life. It generally encourages more learner talk for real communicative purposes and a facilitative role for the teacher.

EFL - Acronym for English as a Foreign Language.

Error - A mistake made in language learning which shows that the learner hasn't yet learnt something.

Evaluation - Gathering information about a class or an individual in order to form a judgment (e.g. about English level or about a trainee's teaching).

Facilitator - An assistant to or a guide of a group, who helps the group to find their own answers rather than providing them with 'right' answers.

Feedback - Information that is given to learners about their spoken or written performance, or to trainees or teachers about their teaching.

Fluency - The ability to produce language easily, to communicate quickly but not necessarily with grammatical correctness. Compare accuracy.

Gist - The main idea or message of a text, either spoken or written.

Humanistic activities - Teaching techniques which emphasise the whole person and acceptance of his or her individual values and emotions. Also humanism.

Hyponym - A word which is included in the meaning of another word (e.g. daisy is a hyponym of flower).

Inference - A guess about something from a text, reading between the lines. Also to infer.

Information gap - An activity in which a learner knows something that another learner does not know, so has to communicate to 'close the gap'. Information gaps are used a lot in communicative language teaching (e.g. two learners have two different pictures and have to find the differences between them without showing their pictures to each other).

Integrated skills - All of the language skills (listening, reading, speaking, writing) together. Integrated skills activities bring together different language skills (e.g. learners discuss a writing assignment, thus practising listening, speaking and writing).

Interaction - Patterns of communication (verbal and non-verbal) between people.

Jigsaw tending - An activity which involves re-ordering a mixed up text to find its correct order; it helps learners see the connections between parts of a written text.

Language acquisition - 'Picking up' a language; not learning it consciously, but by being exposed to it in natural situations (e.g. as a child learns his first language). Often contrasted with language learning, which Involves a conscious knowledge of the language (e.g. grammatical rules).

Language skills - There are four principal language skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing. The skills also involve grammar and vocabulary.

Learner-centered teaching - Learning situations where information and ideas are brought to the class by learners and used as learning material and which are concerned with the interests, needs, learning styles, feelings, lives and/or values of learners.

Learning strategy - A process or technique which a learner uses to help herself to learn a language (e.g. looking at a photograph above a newspaper article before reading is a reading strategy).

Learning style - The way a particular learner learns something (e.g. by watching, by doing).

Method - The procedures and techniques that are characteristic of teaching.

Mind map - A diagram which supposedly represents the brain or the mind: topics are clustered on the page together as they are believed to be collected in the brain.

Mixed-ability class - A group of learners whose proficiency levels span a range (e.g. high-beginning, low intermediate, high-intermediate).

Monitoring - What a teacher does while learners are doing an activity (e.g. group work); walking around the class and listening to, checking or helping learners.

Observation - Gathering information together by-watching a class, in order to describe what is happening.

Problem-solving activity - An activity where a learner has to solve a problem (e.g. learners have descriptions of several applicants and have to decide together who might be the best one for a certain job).

Productive skills - Speaking and writing. Learners are required to produce the language by speaking and writing. Compare receptive skills.

Realia - Things from real life which are used for learning (e.g. classroom furniture, pictures, household objects).

Receptive skills - Listening and reading. Learners are receiving language and processing it, without producing it.

Role-play - A communicative activity in which learners talk to each other in different character roles.

Scanning - Reading quickly to find specific information from a text. Compare skimming.

Simulation - A role-play where you play yourself in a given situation.

Skimming - Reading quickly to find the main idea(s) of a text. Compare scanning.

Teaching space - The area that a teacher uses in the classroom while teaching.

Transition - The way a teacher makes a link between two separate parts of a lesson.