“For years, Russian scientists harvested the brains of exceptionally smart people, trying to locate the source of their intelligence. After V.I. Lenin died in 1924, for example, the Russians invited the great German neuroanatomist Oskar Vogt to try to locate the ‘source of genius’ in the leader of the Russian revolution. Vogt cut Lenin’s brain into more than 1,100 slices, but he found nothing exceptional except unusually large pyramidal cells.
The last brain that the Russians studied in this way was that of Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and human rights activist who died in 1989. From the dozens of brains they studied, the researchers made many observations about brain size, the density of neurons and the number of convolutions of the cortex, but their findings revealed next to nothing about human intelligence.
Today, scientists around the world continue to search for the physiological basis of human intelligence, but they also focus on genetic variation, which appears to determine about half of a brain’s cognitive ability on average, as measured by standard IQ tests. And by using modern scanning techniques, they are gaining much more detailed insights into the structure and function of the brain than the Russians could achieve through dissection.”
(via The Dana Foundation)
April 9, 2008 at 3:09 am
maybe in spine , or wherever serotonin resides.
April 9, 2008 at 3:15 am
“Low levels of serotonin may also be associated with intense religious experiences” which means Lenin must have had too much o’ it.
April 9, 2008 at 5:11 am
what i am sure of is that if you’re talkative you sure are intellegent n’ people on MDMA talk more than anybody which means are connected to many sources in memory
April 9, 2008 at 10:05 am
“Today, scientists around the world continue to search for the physiological basis of human intelligence, but they also focus on genetic variation, which appears to determine about half of a brain?s cognitive ability on average, as measured by standard IQ tests.”
What happened in the past when James Watson, Richard J. Herrnstein or Charles Murray said that IQ has a biological component?
Why is that not happening now to the author of this article or the editors of Technoccult?
April 9, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Trevor sweet soul brother , it is happening.
Steampunk-sanity-bar dropped , it can’t be happening!!
April 9, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I think this is nonsense. The brain is a network that can only be measured by its whole system.
Im not a neurologist, but this is what Ive been told by scientologists.