Are we USING our INTELLIGENCE?

When natural intelligence is unused, underused, abused, and misused, rather than used, it is now time for artificial intelligence to take up the lead.

The Situation Unfolds

One day, I was walking to my friend’s place. I was dressed normally, and there was a man in rags walking in front of me. A dog came running and started barking at him. It looked at me but did not bark. I was quite surprised by this situation, and I forgot all about it.

Later, when I was talking to another friend, he was praising his dog and said dogs are quite intelligent. I narrated the incident where the dog did not bark at me but barked at the man in rags.

This made my friend sit up and he started talking animatedly about other virtues of dogs. He said dogs are so intelligent that they can distinguish between a good guy and a bad guy; and a person who is reliable as against an untrustworthy person.

This set me to think.

How do the dogs know who is a good guy or a bad one?

Does the attire determine the quality of a person?

Are dogs as intelligent as human beings that they are capable of knowing who is good and who is bad?

Or is it that we humans use so much intelligence as dogs that we can’t go beyond the distinction of a well-dressed person against an ill-dressed person?

When a stranger wearing a suit comes to our house we invite him inside before asking him who he is. On the other hand, if a man in rags comes near the house, then we think that he wants something from us, and we are ready to send him away. We open the gates to the stranger and close the gates to the latter.

Are we capable of judging him beyond what he is wearing?

Or are we trying to act as if we are intelligent, though, in reality, we are just using the same amount of intelligence as that of a dog?

Our Socialization Process

How do we acquire this habit of trusting someone based on their dress?

The answer lies in our socialization process. Most of the people we know and interact with daily dress the way we do. We see people in rags as outside our social circle.

Children encounter them only on the streets and not in schools, buses, hotels, malls, or other places that they frequent. They develop a stereotype that these people are to be kept out of everyday interaction.

Is it not the same thing that the dog has learned, too?

We take a few years to learn what it has learned in a few months! Yet we consider human beings to be more intelligent than dogs!

A thief or a robber can get away easily if he learns to dress well. Not only dogs do not bark at him nor chase him, but we too seem to entertain that person.

If we cannot use our intelligence to find out something beyond the way one is dressed up, then why are we ascribing ourselves with a greater amount of wisdom, tolerance, ‘love thy neighbor’, empathy, succor, and hundreds of other words that the dog has very little meaning for?

The man in old rags minds his business in his very own small way and he does not want what we have but we are afraid that he will ask for it. The people whom we trust always want something from us and we let them in, only to be misguided and cheated by the so-called well-dressed people!

All confidence tricksters who cheat people are always well-dressed because they know how gullible people are. Nevertheless, we still haven’t learned lessons from it and continue to show respect based on dress.

And yet we certify ourselves as being more intelligent than the dog!

Either we have learned a lot from the dogs or we have failed to learn beyond the primordial ways of reacting to circumstances. If we were to make a list of what a dog does daily (whether the dog is tamed or not, matters little), and if we substitute the word ‘dogs’ for ‘humans’ and the word ‘food’ for ‘money or power’, then are we doing something different from the dog or other animals in the wild?

What Is This Intelligence?

Is it the ability to score good marks in the examination, or is it the way we deal with people?

Neither answer is completely true.

Intelligence is defined by Robert Feldman (2021) as “the capacity to understand the world, think rationally, and use resources effectively when faced with challenges.”

A better definition is provided by David Wechsler (1896-1981) as “the global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment.”

In almost all definitions, rational thinking has been emphasized but usually, our thinking is clouded by irrationality like beliefs, superstitions, bias, prejudices, and stereotypes.

The weight of the human brain is 1300 to 1400 grams as against 72 grams of the dog’s brain weight. The ratio of brain weight to body weight in dogs is 1:125 whereas in humans it is 1:40. The Encephalization Quotient (EQ, which takes into consideration the body weight, the cephalization factor, and the average mammalian value) of dogs is 1.17 while that of human being is 7.44.

According to Dr. Colin Groves (1942-2017), domestication of dogs not only shrank the size of the dogs’ brains but also disabled certain regions of the brain (like mid-brain and olfactory bulbs) in human beings.

Have we been learning from dogs for the last several thousand years and losing our intelligence?

Losing Without Using

Are we wasting over 100 billion nerve cells in our brains?

How much of it are we using?

Should we learn to use more of our inherent capacity or should we continue to learn from animals?

Research indicates that when humans start depending on animals they gradually develop deficits in the areas of the brain both structurally and functionally. My experience has indicated that the more we depend on tools, technology, and gadgets, the more we lose out on our brain capacity. For instance, depending on the calculator to do arithmetic may increase our speed and accuracy.

However, have we ever thought of the cost?

Without a calculator, we are unable to calculate! We see such trends in the Western world nowadays: without a machine, no one does any transaction because people cannot calculate. The fact that people have been searching for an answer on “Google Search” to the question “What is 15% of 100?” means that there is something seriously wrong with their upbringing.

Testing Brain Functions

We use neuropsychological tests that can determine whether a particular region of the brain is being used or not. Most of these tests are used to measure the extent of brain damage but when the same tests were administered to normal children, we found glaring deficiencies existing in the brain development. Brain dysfunction is usually due to brain injury, chemical imbalance, toxicity, emotional imbalance, psychological disorders, or degeneration of brain cells as in Alzheimer’s disease. On the other hand, it could be simply because we have stopped using the brain.

Though children are inherently capable of learning verbal, perceptual, memory, conceptual, constructional, and executive functions in addition to finite motor performance, orientation, and attention, their learning depends upon environmental stimulation. Our research has shown time and again that many children lack school readiness, have reading and learning problems, possess emotional difficulties, and do not reach developmental milestones. The child’s ability is not in question but the system we are adhering to is costing the future generation.

We are already seeing its consequences in children and adults trying to commit suicide, getting into addiction, showing criminal behavior, killing innocent people (including running amok and terrorism), etc.

The greater the variety in stimulation, the greater the development of the brain and consequently, intelligence.

We need to ask ourselves a serious question:

Are we providing such varied experiences, challenges, and opportunities for our children to grow so that their intelligence increases?

Having a Pocketful Of Money And Starving To Death

It is not a question of having or not having intelligence but of how much intelligence we are using. The more we depend on someone or something, the more we make stereotypical responses. All connections in the brain are electrochemical. The fewer the connections the less our ability to use intelligence.

Howard Gardner propounds eight types of intelligence: musical, bodily-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. J. P. Guilford proposes 150 intellectual abilities that are used regularly.

Imagine for a moment that all the traffic in the city is diverted to a single highway. The result would be a traffic jam, greater wear and tear, wastage of time, inability to use resources, and so on. There is always a similar perennial traffic jam in our brains as we use the same set of neurons for most of our thinking. Though we are endowed with billions of cells, we rarely use most of them.

The following video reflects the situation the centennial generation is going through and you can identify their lack of intelligence.