Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 3 MindBrained Bulletin Think Tank Work Mem Mar 1 2 | Page 14

it wasn’t even a good question to ask in the first place. And as a result, we ended up
marking certain places, like Broca’s Area, as doing language. For me, at least, this
was one of the first things I was taught about the brain.
However, recent studies suggest that Broca’s area is not even involved in word
production, but seems to just connect networks related to what we call “words,”
“memory,” and “speech production.” The distortion arising from the notion that
Broca’s Area exists to produce language becomes more obvious when you consider
how long we overlooked the fact that it becomes active in other kinds of processing as
well, processing that has nothing to do with language, and that when the Broca’s
Area begins to deteriorate, other parts of the brain take over its language functions.
How inconvenient.
In short, the terminology we have created makes it easy for us to mistake the map for
the territory. We cannot abandon that terminology any more than I could in writing
this piece, because these simplifications give us a grasp on the brain. We need these
metaphors the same way that in the fifties and sixties we got a basic understanding of
the brain by comparing it to a computer. Think of all the terminology we generated
from this way of conceiving: input, output, information processing, circuits, wiring,
and so on. This simplistic metaphor also led to distortions, but helped us understand
as well.
I am still not sure what distortions are created
by the term “working memory,” other than the
drifting definitions I mentioned earlier, so
maybe a better example of terminal distortion
is “intelligence.” For example, can we really
say fixed and fluid intelligence are separate
entities? Everything we’ve discovered about plasticity suggests they aren’t. And what
about multiple intelligences? Forests have disappeared over the argument on
whether certain intelligences are truly intelligences or just skills. However, from the
neuronal perspective, there probably isn’t any difference at all. Being able to do
something better just means having stronger synapses, more myelination, and so on.
How then, is a skill qualitatively different from an intelligence in the first place? I
always feel, when reading those heated debates, like they are coming from a different
age, from before the big schism (that time in history when we could actually see
inside the brain).
Can we really say
fixed and fluid
intelligence are
separate entities?
Likewise, when Howard Gardner himself says one thing is an intelligence and
another is not, it seems, well, frivolous, like cartographers arguing over how to color
a map. Then again, maybe Gardner feels that way too. In a video we will feature in a
future Think Tank, he refutes the suggestion that humor, sexual, and cooking
abilities might be intelligences by quipping, “Well, they can’t be intelligences because
I don’t have any of them.” (Thanks, Howard. We need your playfulness.)
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