Intelligence is essentially social, according to a study

Research on brain injuries and the abilities of war veterans Americans from the Vietnam War who had suffered contusions or gunshot wounds to the skull has thrown new and revealing data on the nature of human intelligence.

Intelligence and the social

A study from the University of Illinois has found that certain brain areas who participate in human social activity are also fundamental to the general intelligence and emotional.

This discovery strengthens the idea that intelligence arises from the social and emotional context of the person.

"We are trying to understand the nature of intelligence and to what degree our intellectual capacity is based on the cognitive abilities we use to interact socially," he says. aron barbey, professor of neurosciences and one of the scientists who led the research.

Intellect and social context

The academic literature in social psychology explains that human intellectual abilities emerge from the everyday social context, according to Barbey.

"We require a previous stage in our development of interpersonal relationships: those who love us care and are interested in us. If this did not happen, we would be much more vulnerable, we would be defenseless, ”she points out. The subject-society interdependence continues into adulthood and continues to be transcendental throughout life.

“People close to us, friends and family, alert us when we may be making a mistake and sometimes help us if we do,” she says. “The ability to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships, essential to relate to the context immediate is not a concrete cognitive capacity that arises from the intellectual function, but the relationship is reverse. Intelligence can arise from the basic role of social relationships in human life, and consequently they are closely linked to emotional capacity and social skills.

How the research was done

The study looked at a total of 144 American war veterans with head injuries caused by shrapnel or bullets. Each lesion had its characteristics and affected different brain tissues, but due to the nature of the lesions that were analyzed, the adjacent tissues were unharmed.

Lesioned areas were mapped using tomography, then regrouped the data to provide a comparative brain map.

The scientists used a variety of carefully designed tests and tests to assess the intellectual, emotional, and social skills of veterans. They then looked for patterns linking lesions in certain brain areas with deficits in the subjects' ability to develop intellectually, emotionally, or socially.

The questions about social problems were based on the resolution of conflicts with close people.

As already reported in previous investigations on intelligence and emotional intelligence, the scientists found that areas of the frontal cortex (the front part of the brain), the parietal cortex (upper part of the skull) and temporal lobes (the side of the brain, behind the ears) are involved in social conflict resolution everyday.

The brain regions that assisted in social behavior in the parietal and temporal lobes are located in the left cerebral hemisphere. For their part, the left and right frontal lobes also participated in social functioning.

overlap

The neural connections that are considered essential for interpersonal skills did not turn out to be identical to those favoring general and emotional intelligence, but the degree of overlap was significant.

“The results suggest that there is an integrated architecture of information processing, that the Social skills are based on the mechanisms dedicated to general and emotional intelligence," he says. Barbey.

These conclusions are consistent with the idea that intelligence is largely based on emotional and social abilities, and we should understand intelligence as a product of cognitive integration, instead of discriminating between cognition and emotions and the process of social transformation. These are conclusions that fit with the social nature of human beings: our lives go by while we try to understand others and solve certain social conflicts. Our research suggests that the architecture of intelligence in the brain may have a large social component."

In other study of 2013, Barbey reached similar results. On that occasion, he highlighted that general intelligence had a strong link with emotional intelligence, analyzing both IQ tests and damaged brain areas.

Likewise, in 2012, Barbey mapped for the first time the distribution of intelligence-related tasks in the brain.

Bibliographic references:

• TO. K. Barbey, R. Colum, E. J. Paul, a. Chao, J. Solomon, J. h. Grafman: Lesion mapping of social problem solving. Brain (2014). DOI: 10.1093/brain/awu207.

• original study: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014...