Four decades ago, I was working out the details of the theory of multiple intelligences. One vital source of information was the delineation of specific areas of the cortex that are critical for the operation of particular intelligences—for example, regions of the left hemisphere for language computation, and regions of the right hemisphere for spatial computation. (Of course, in left handed persons, this dominance is often reversed).
In the intervening decades, a great deal of new information has been discerned about the brain basis for various cognitive capacities. For one thing, we know much more about how individual neurons or neuron networks are dedicated to specific computations—as often quipped by students, the so-called “grandmother” or “Jennifer Aniston” neural networks, which are activated solely by those specific “stimuli.”
In both the article The Neurons That Hold Our Hidden Thoughts by Slomski and the article, Single-Neuronal Predictions of Others’ Beliefs in Humans by Jamali, Grannan., Fedorenko, et al., I was very pleased to learn about the findings of a group of neuroscientists affiliated with MIT and the Massachuetts General Hospital in Boston. Recording neural activity as patients were undergoing neurosurgery, the researchers discovered individual neurons that are sensitive to the beliefs and feelings of other persons. Even more compellingly, some neurons are so specialized that they respond only in cases where the belief of another individual is thought to be false—and some neurons encode information that distinguishes one person’s belief from another. As concluded by lead scientist Jamali, “By combining the computations of all the neurons, you get a very detailed representation of the contents of another’s beliefs and an accurate prediction of whether they are true or false.”
The relationship of these findings to “MI theory” should be clear. For understanding of other persons (interpersonal intelligence) and for understanding of yourself (intrapersonal intelligences), you need cognitive mechanisms that represent beliefs, who holds them, and whether those beliefs are warranted or not. The last sentence is self-evident: Now we know that these capacities are computed by specific neural networks which can be distinguished from one another.
Photo by Robina Weermeijeron Unsplash