Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast episode 81, Intelligence, Part 2. I'm your host, James Fodor. So this episode will be continuing from part one of the series on intelligence, so episode 80. I recommend you listen to that before listening to this one. And in this episode, we'll be building on some of the material that we discussed last time.

So in the last episode we talked about some definitions of intelligence, various methods of measuring intelligence,

and we talked about the G factor, how that's defined, how that's determined, and various debates about the interpretation of the G-factor, theories of

multiple intelligence and so on. In this episode, what we're going to cover is some of the

research relating to the biology of intelligence, including genetics and neuroscience of

intelligence. We're going to look at some of the literature relating to interventions to

increase intelligence. We'll also look at some of the research on the heritability of intelligence and the sort of nature versus nurture debate,

and we'll be talking about some of the methodological issues in that, relating to some of that research.

And finally, we'll also discuss the Flynn effect, the strange phenomena of

increasing IQ scores over time. And some of the methodological discussions that we'll have,

or the issues that we'll discuss in this episode will be relevant to the third part of this

series, which will be focusing on group differences in intelligence.

Okay, so with that groundwork, the framework of what we're going to be talking about,

let's make a start talking about the biology of intelligence.

So, although from researching cognitive psychology, we're pretty sure that there is this thing called intelligence, which is some sort of, refers to some sort of

underlying cognitive phenomenon whereby some people are better, on average, at thinking

and reasoning and problem solving and abstract thinking than others, and that this is measured

by consistent performance across a wide variety of cognitive tasks and tests.

So we're pretty sure that that's a real thing, that's a psychological phenomenon.

However, the underlying biology behind why that is the case, that is why some people do better at these tests than others, why some people are more intelligent than others, that's still quite poorly understood.

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