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My View of the Elephant

The First Tributary: Basic Cognitive Abilities

All of our intelligent functioning — and all our less-than-intelligent functioning, too! — is necessarily based in our brain. No brain, no action. As with many big ideas, it’s surprisingly easy to forget this. All our abilities as humans rely absolutely on information coded into our central nervous system, centered in our brain. Some brain functions take care of useful matters like breathing, eating, reproduction, and emotions. The functions this book examines are only a part of what the brain does: They are the ones that have to do with our mental capacity.

What our brain does, even with all its wondrous complexity, comes down to a question of how it’s wired — how its neurons are interconnected — and of the chemicals that surround and influence the “wiring.” What we do when we teach a child a new idea is make a change in the way that child’s brain is wired. In some poorly understood, but enormously efficient way, the new idea rewires some small part of the brain. The new idea isn’t anywhere else, it’s in the brain. Our ideas and abilities, and all our skills, strategies, and goals are represented by electrical impulses and chemical compounds. When we help a child learn, we parents and teachers are doing something like what brain surgeons do — except that our work is infinitely more subtle, and we do it hundreds of times a day as our kids grow and learn!

Now, common sense and a huge body of research agree that the brain has certain basic cognitive abilities. For example, the brain can take in information through the eyes, analyze that information, and coordinate what it perceives with other parts of the brain in order to do all kinds of tasks, from kicking a ball to recognizing a friend.

The first tributary of the Intelligence River is this idea of basic brain functions. This is the essential contribution of Cognitive Abilities Theory.

Here is a sampling of the kind of basic cognitive abilities which are likely to serve as foundations for all intelligence:

• Visual perception — seeing, interpreting, remembering, and reproducing visual information
• Auditory perception — hearing, interpreting, remembering, and reproducing auditory information, whether it be sounds, speech, or musical tones or rhythms
• Abilities which gather information via the senses of touch, smell, and taste
• The intertwined processes of learning and memory — how well we get information into storage, and how quickly, fluently, and effectively we retrieve it. How much we can remember. Our ability to hold a memory briefly or indefinitely, according to need. Our ability to work with our memory to do a task. How well we can substitute updated knowledge for older understandings.

Now, there are three complexities you may want to notice here.

First complexity: We don’t know for sure how these abilities are organized inside the brain. Some of them may be general, some of them may be specific. For example, parts of the brain surely do low-level analysis of what comes in from the eyes: very basic tasks like recognizing lines and the edges of objects. The sharper these basic abilities, the better the basis on which we can build all our intelligences, so I’ll offer lots of ideas to develop these basic building blocks. But other, higher level centers are likely to be quite specialized — for example, centers that recognize faces. From the practical point of view, we don’t have to worry about this, as long as we make sure we offer many kinds of stimulation, so that each specialized center that may exist has input to grow on.

Second complexity: Later on, when we turn to actually developing our kids’ abilities, we’ll think of some of these abilities both as basic building blocks for intelligence and as full-fledged ways to be intelligent. This is getting ahead of the story, but just so you know where we’re going, consider an example: all the information that comes to us through our eyes. When we think about helping infants develop, we’ll think of this crucial ability as a building block for many ways of being smart, and we’ll look at strategies to stimulate it generally. But in later development, we’ll think of it as a full-fledged intelligence, and offer our kids opportunities to grow in the intelligence that is centered in visual ability. Another one of the cognitive abilities we discussed will get special attention: “Fluid Intelligence,” thinking ability, is a key skill which cuts across categories. Accordingly, activities to help develop it are built into everything you’ll do.

Third complexity: We don’t know for sure how much these foundation cognitive abilities can be directly influenced or even which ones can be influenced. (For example, I’m doubtful that the basic processing speed of the brain, which Cognitive Abilities Theory called Cognitive Processing Speed and Decision / Reaction Time or Speed, is likely to be directly influenceable.) Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about the details of what we do. We know these basic abilities are important. We know that rich, general stimulation is good for the developing brain. Even though we can’t always say that a particular stimulation is strengthening a particular function, we can say that general stimulation helps these foundation abilities grow and strengthen. So, especially in early childhood, you’ll give your child all sorts of material to “chew on” — brain food, if you will! — without always being able to say exactly what effect it’s having at that moment. From the good overall diet, she’ll take what nourishment she needs right now.

Starting Our Map

As we think about each tributary, each contributor to the Intelligence River, let's imagine a map of the whole Intelligence River system. We'll ask: How shall we imagine this tributary on our overall map of the Intelligence River? I see this first contributor as a stream with many branches — each branch representing a specific cognitive ability. They all flow together into one stream, which represents the idea of underlying, foundational cognitive strength. In our present state of knowledge, we can’t say how many of these small branches there are, so don’t imagine this first tributary made up of many small branches too literally.