What is intelligence?

What would it be like to have a much lower or higher IQ than you currently have — for example, to be a squirrel or an advanced space alien? This week’s episode is about intelligence. What is it and what is its history and future? Join Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of several schools of thought about what intelligence might mean in the brain.

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More Information:

Nagel, T. (1980). What is it like to be a bat?. In The Language and Thought Series (pp. 159-168). Harvard University Press.

Eagleman DM. (2023). A proposed test for human-level intelligence in AI. PsyArXiv.

Eagleman DM. (2007). 10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain. Discover Magazine.

Duncan J, Seitz RJ, Kolodny J, Bor D, Herzog H, Ahmed A, Newell FN, Emslie H. (2000). A neural basis for general intelligence. Science. 2000 Jul 21;289(5478):457-60.

Duncan J, Assem M, Shashidhara S. Integrated intelligence from distributed brain activity. (2020). Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2020 Oct 1;24(10):838-52.

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"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker