Brain Circuit for Spirituality Identified

No surprise that this headline grabbed my attention. While I have deliberately avoided the phrases “religious intelligence” or “spiritual intelligence,” I have often speculated about the existence of what I term “existential intelligence”—the intelligence that poses and ponders “big questions.” All of us have the capacity to raise big question—about life, love, existence, death—but individuals differ greatly in their capacity and their inclination for pursuing such questions. As I have sometimes quipped “All kids pose big questions—but only a small subset listen for answers and pursue them further.”

Researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital have located spiritual concerns in a specific area of the brain—a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning and pain modulation, among other functions. The researchers drew their conclusions from neurosurgical patients who were interviewed about “spiritual acceptance” before and after surgery for a brain tumor. (A similar set of questions were posed to war veterans who had penetrating head trauma).

The findings: out of the 88 neurosurgical patients, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Spirituality seems to map on a specific brain circuit centered in the periaqueductral gray region (known as the PAG). One could readily conclude that the results were random or simply a bell-shaped curve. But the authors also report several case studies of patients who became hyper-religious after certain brain lesions (this finding had been reported in previous decades with respect to patients who exhibit temporal lobe epilepsy).

Given everything that’s been established about evolution in the animal kingdom, I cannot believe that there are certain areas of the brain that relate to, or undergird specifically religious beliefs and behaviors. But I find it quite easy to believe that certain areas of the brain deal with experiences that seem to be enveloping—what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called “an oceanic feeling.” In my own case, those experiences occur specifically when I am playing or listening to music, and in interactions with family members, particularly the youngest and the oldest. My own preference is to call these “existential issues, drawing on existential intelligence”—but if researchers want to invoke the terms “spiritual” or “religious” that’s OK with me.

Clearly, there’s some affinity between the PAG and the capacity to engage in overarching issues. But it will take a lot more research to establish just what functions are subserved by that brain area, how they are manifest, and which procedures or diseases exacerbate or minimize these “existential” inclinations.

Reference

Ferguson, M., Schaper, F., Cohen, A., Siddiqi, S., Nielsen, J., Grafman, J., Urgesi, C., Fabbro, F. and Fox, M., 2021. A neural circuit for spirituality and religiosity derived from patients with brain lesions. Brain Psychiatry, [online] Available at: <https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(21)01403-7/fulltext> [Accessed 29 June 2021]. As reported in Neuroscience News.

Interrogating “Digital Intelligence”

Acknowledging my work on multiple intelligences, Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence, and Robert Sternberg’s work on practical intelligence, authors Ian Stewart and Myles Runham propose an intelligence that they deem important for leaders and learning officers in the future.

They dub it “DI”—for “Digital Intelligence.”

Stewart and Runham, both associated the Kaplan Performance Academy, are not the first to propose this form of cognition. They themselves acknowledge Digital Intelligent Quotient and the World Economic Forum’s Skills for the future. And quite a few years ago, my colleagues, Antonio Battro and Percy Denham, issued a small book on La Educacion Digital.

Stewart and Runham identify three components of digital intelligence:

• Analytical (critical thinking, dealing with data, complex problem solving and synthesizing)

• Collaborative (leadership, followership, participative decision making, digital presence and community, creativity and innovation, experimenting and testing)

• Practical (fluent communication skills, self-regulation, commercial awareness, evidence -based decision making. digital fluency)

What I like about this scheme is that it recognizes a wide swathe of those capacities that are most useful for our era— in many ways a digital age. One by one, these capacities are worth identifying and nurturing.

But I do not find persuasive that the three buckets—Analytical, Collaborative, and Practical, are by any means mutually exclusive.

Nor do I find a rationale for the subcategorization. Creativity and innovation can be found anywhere, as can leadership and followership. Same for complex problem solving or evidence-based decision making.

Moreover, most of the scheme would be equally applicable to a non-digital time. We need a clearer delineation of what is rendered specifically to our contemporary world.

When I developed “MI theory” many years ago, I sought to identify capacities that were distinct from one another—and each of the “intelligences” had its specific sub-categories. If Stewart and Runham’s taxonomy is to be persuasive, it needs to provide a rationale for positing of the three separate buckets; the placement within them of the more specific capacities and practices; and a demonstration of what is characteristic of the world of 2021, as opposed to the world of  earlier times.

Reference

Runham, M. and Stewart, I., 2021. After EI, DI?. [online] Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media. Available at: <https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2021/06/29/after-ei-di/> [Accessed 23 July 2021].

 Photo credit: Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Is There a Digital Intelligence?

A recent article on the website, Chief Learning Officer (click here for link), suggests the existence of a digital intelligence. The authors, Ian Stewart and Miles Runham, describe digital intelligence as

“a loose framework to help us identify the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors that make up the ‘digital sensibility’ needed to operate and succeed in increasingly digital organizations and marketplaces”

They outline a possible model and suggest ways to develop and grow this intelligence.

Howard Gardner had this to say on the matter of technological or digital intelligence:

“Although a technological intelligence makes sense, I am conservative in adding new intelligences. Instead, I believe what is exhibited as ‘technological intelligence’ is actually a combination of spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and logical-mathematical intelligences. Digital intelligence is basically logical-mathematical intelligence with a ‘dollop’ of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. 

Stephen Mithen, a British anthropologist, does believe that humans stand out because of our technological / tool-making intellectual capacities. In addition, my colleague, neurologist Antonio Battro, published a book, in Spanish, on digital intelligence. The book is titled Hacia una Inteligencia Digital and can be found here.

So the idea has some currency in the world of scholarship.” 

Howard Gardner on Edu Futures Podcast

Howard Gardner was recently interviewed on Edu Futures, a weekly podcast about “forecasts, frontiers, and futures in education” by host, Dr. Bernard Bull, President of Goddard College, Vermont.

In this podcast, Gardner describes how he developed the theory of multiple intelligences, and how it was received. He discusses his recent intellectual memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, and his new book with Wendy Fischman, The Real World of College, to be published in 2022.

Listen here to find out more.

Photo by Jonathan Velasquez on Unsplash

A Brain Basis for Intra-personal Intelligence?

When I first proposed the theory of multiple intelligences many years ago, one of the most powerful sources of evidence in support of the theory was this fact: injury to different portions of the cortex results in different profiles of strength and weakness. To use the most familiar example, lesions in the middle/medial area of the left cerebral cortex lead to problems with language; while lesions in the posterior regions of the right cerebral cortex lead to problems with spatial processing (these characterizations hold in right-handed persons; the picture with left-handed individuals proves to be more complex). If the brain “assigns” certain functions to specific parts of the brain, this finding suggests that these facets of intellect are or can be dissociated.

Collating evidence for cerebral localization of the understanding of human beings (the personal intelligences) proved to be a greater challenge. Evidence came largely from certain clinical conditions, such as autism, Asperger syndrome, and/or more diffuse damage to the right hemisphere (again, in right-handed persons). And being able to distinguish between understanding of others and understanding of oneself eluded cortical accounts. (Accordingly, in Frames of Mind, I had but a single chapter, entitled “The Personal Intelligences.”) As I have sometimes quipped, only your psychoanalyst knows whether you have a good understanding of yourself.

But this situation may be changing. In an interesting article published recently in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the authors claim that the ventral portion of the medial prefrontal cortex “has a greater response during the retrieval of self-knowledge than knowledge of others. Moreover, damage to this region has been shown to impair the ability to retrieve self-knowledge while leaving trait knowledge concerning others intact.” The authors go on to speculate that we draw on our self-knowledge in making inference about others—even characters in fiction—to the extent that (we believe) they resemble ourselves.

MI theory is a synthesis of a vast amount of knowledge about human cognition. No single experiment or observation can prove or disprove it. But it is encouraging when research exploring issues quite remote from theories of “intelligence” provides support for claims from the theory.

Citation:

Broom, Timothy W., Robert S. Chavez, Dylan D. Wagner. Becoming the King in the North: identification with fictional characters is associated with greater self–other neural overlap. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Volume 16, Issue 6, June 2021. Pages 541–551, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsab021

I thank Branton Shearer for bringing this work to my attention.

Photo by Natasha Connellon Unsplash