Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett Read Free Book Online Page A

suggesting that they only need to have a couple of attractive traits and women will be inexplicably drawn to them, like moths to a gangly, witty flame. Height is far from the only thing people are attracted to. Also, tall men tend to have taller daughters, and a lot of men are put off and intimidated by tall women (or so my tall female friends tell me).
    Same goes for intelligent women (or so my intelligent female friends tell me, which for the record is all of them). There’s no real actual evidence to suggest that women are invariably attracted to intelligent men either, for various reasons; for instance, confidence is often considered sexy and, as we’ve seen, intelligent people can be less confident overall. This isn’t to mention the fact that intelligence can be unnerving and off-putting; the terms “nerd” or “geek” may have been largely reclaimed these days, but they were insults for much of their history, and the stereotype is of them being typically dreadful with the opposite sex. These are just a few examples of how the spread of genes for both height and intelligence could be limited.
    Another theory is that growing tall requires access to good health and nutrition, and this may also facilitate brain and therefore intelligence development. It could be as simple as that; greater access to good nutrition and a healthier life during development may result in both increased height and intelligence. It can’t be just that though, because countless people who have the most privileged and healthy life imaginable end up being short. Or an idiot. Or both.
    Could it be to do with brain size? Taller people do have typically bigger brains, and there is a minor correlation between brain size and general intelligence. 14 This is quite a contentious issue. The efficiency of the brain’s processing and connections plays a big part in an individual’s intelligence. but then there is also the fact that certain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, are bigger and have more gray matter in people of greater intelligence. Bigger brains would logically make this more likely or possible just by presenting the resources to expand and develop. Thegeneral impression seems to be that a bigger brain is maybe yet another contributing factor, but not a definite cause. Big brains perhaps give you more of a chance of becoming intelligent, rather than it being an inevitability? Buying expensive new running shoes doesn’t actually make you faster at running, but they might encourage you to become so. The same can be said of specific genes, actually.
    Genetics, parenting styles, quality of education, cultural norms, stereotyping, general health, personal interests, disorders; all of these and more can lead to the brain being more or less able or likely to perform intelligent actions. You can no more separate human intelligence from human culture than you could separate a fish’s development from the water it lives in. Even if you were to separate a fish from the water, its development would only ever be “brief.”
    Culture plays a massive role in how intelligence manifests. A perfect example of this was provided in the 1980s by Michael Cole. 15 He and his team went to the remote Kpelle tribe in Africa, a tribe that was relatively untouched by modern culture and the outside world. They wanted to see if equivalent human intelligence was demonstrated in the Kpelle people, stripped of the cultural factors of Western civilization. At first, it proved frustrating; the Kpelle people could demonstrate only rudimentary intelligence, and couldn’t even solve basic puzzles, the kind a developed-world child would surely have no problem with. Even if the researcher “accidentally” gave clues as to the right answers, the Kpelle still didn’t grasp it. This suggested that their primitive culture wasn’t rich or stimulating enough to produce advanced intelligence, or