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Monthly Archives: December 2017

The Neuroscience of Intelligence: An Interview with Richard Haier.. Submitted by Kashif Sheikh

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written by Claire Lehmann

Richard Haier is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California Irvine and is the author of the Neuroscience of Intelligence published by Cambridge University Press. Over his career he has used neuroimaging to study how brain function and structure relate to intelligence, and the ways in which “smart” brains work. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence and the past president of the International Society for Intelligence Research. I reached out to him earlier this year to ask about his new book. What follows is an interview conducted with Quillette via email.

The Neuroscience of Intelligence by Richard J Haier, published by Cambridge University Press

Thank you for taking the time to talk to Quillette Professor Haier. You’ve spent forty years studying intelligence and have compiled your knowledge into a new book accessible to the general reader called TheNeuroscience of Intelligence, which looks fascinating from its précis. Firstly, can you tell us how you became interested in intelligence research, and how you came about studying intelligence through neuroimaging?

When I started graduate school at Johns Hopkins in 1971, I was interested in social psychology and personality theories. That year Professor Julian Stanley was starting the Study of Mathematically and Scientifically Precocious Youth. I worked on his first talent search passing out pencils for 12 and 13 year old kids taking the SAT-Math exam [a standardized test used for college admission in the US]. The kids had been nominated by their math teachers as the best students in their class. Many of these kids scored as high on this test as college freshman at Hopkins. How they got this special math talent was a fundamental question and it certainly looked like something that came “naturally” since they had not yet had many math courses in school. This started my interest in individual differences in mental abilities, and intelligence was the most interesting and controversial mental ability.

Emeritus Professor Richard Haier

It was after grad school during my first job at the National Institute of Mental Health that I learned more about genetics and how to study the brain with EEG. All these threads came together when I moved to Brown University and started my own lab to study intelligence. In the 1980s, the first neuroimaging with positron emission tomography (PET) became available and I joined my former NIMH colleagues who had moved to UC Irvine and acquired a PET scanner. I used my access to the scanner to study intelligence and brain function, including a study of math reasoning in college men and women, bringing me full circle back to the Hopkins study. Over the next 30 years, neuroimaging developed further with MRI and other technologies that I used to follow the intelligence data even deeper into the brain.

Can you remind me what the difference is between g and an IQ score?

One of the most robust, replicated findings in the entire field of psychology is that all tests of mental abilities are positively correlated with each other. This implies there is a common mental ability that accounts for these associations. This common ability is called the general factor of intelligence, abbreviated as the g-factor. Some tests require more g than others and no one test is a pure measure of g. The best estimate of the g-factor is based on combining scores from a variety of tests that tap different cognitive domains. IQ tests usually combine scores on several subtests that sample from different mental abilities so the IQ score is a good estimate of g. The g-factor is the focus of most intelligence research, especially research that aims to determine why people differ. Based on decades of compelling data (including the latest DNA analyses), many researchers, myself included, think that the g-factor is influenced mostly by genetics. That’s key because it indicates that intelligence can be modified once genetic/neurobiological mechanisms are understood. This is why neuroscience is starting to focus attention on intelligence. 

Is it possible to see if someone is high in g by their brain activity on a PET scan or fMRI scan – and if so, what does it look like?

Our first PET study and many subsequent studies suggest that high intelligence is associated with more efficient brains; there are also indications that more gray matter in certain brain areas and more connections among brain areas are associated with more intelligence.

Since the first neuroimaging studies of intelligence, researchers have been trying to predict intelligence test scores from images. All such attempts had failed independent replication up to the time I was finishing the book and I explained why this was the case. However, right after I submitted my manuscript, a new study suggested this kind of prediction had succeeded. It was based on a mathematical way to assess how brain areas were connected to each other using MRI scans. Apparently, such connection patterns are stable and unique to individuals like fingerprints; and these patterns predict intelligence test scores. I was able to add this study to the book, but it is still not clear if these claims will pass independent replication. If so, there will be many questions to investigate like whether there are sex differences, and age differences that have a developmental sequence. A key question will be how such brain patterns change with learning.

I also describe new neuroscience techniques used in animals to turn neurons on and off to see how behavior changes. It may be possible to adapt some of these techniques for use in humans to study performance on mental tests experimentally instead of by correlations. This is an exciting prospect, especially for young investigators and students thinking about a career in this field.

For the rest of this interesting article click on the following link.

http://quillette.com/2017/12/24/neuroscience-intelligence-interview-richard-haier/

How Victorian Muslims celebrated Christmas submitted to TF by Tariq Khan

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How did Victorian Muslims celebrate Christmas?

 

By Tharik Hussain

Al Jazeera, 15 December 2017

At 6am on December 25, 1888, the winter sun was yet to rise over the English city of Liverpool.

A Victorian terrace house was feverish with activity.

The soft glow of candlelight emanating from 8 Brougham Terrace revealed men and women busily putting up decorations and preparing food for the big celebration ahead, Christmas Day.

In one corner, a familiar Victorian scene of a woman playing the piano and directing hymn rehearsals, the singers’ voices muted by the howling of a bitter north-easterly wind as it rattled the thin panes of glass.

This was Britain’s first mosque and Muslim community preparing for their very first Christmas Day.

At 8am, having led the tiny congregation in the early morning prayer, the Imam finally opened the mosque doors.

Imam William Henry “Abdullah” Quilliam founded the mosque after embracing Islam in 1887, aged 31 years old.

He was greeted by more than 100 of the city’s poor, who had been invited to enjoy a charitable Christmas breakfast inside what locals called “Islam Church”.

As the group of recent converts served the paupers a hearty meal of “sandwiches, bread and meat, seedloaf, bunloaf, bread and butter, tea and coffee,” the music began.

Hymns praising the birth of the Prophet Isa, or Jesus, rung out through the venue. By evening, numbers swelled. Word had got around, and the Muslims offered a “substantial tea” and small musical concert to the visitors.

The entertainment began with “mesmeric performances” by two young Muslims before “some delightful airs upon the zither, the fairy bells and the mandolin” by one Miss Warren.

The finale was a “magic lantern” show and photo series from the imam’s recent tour across distant Muslim lands.

These descriptions of Victorian Muslims at Christmas were taken from the pages of The Crescent, the country’s first Muslim newspaper.

It was published by the Liverpool Moslem Institute between 1893 and 1907 and was recently made available online by the Abdullah Quilliam Society – which is based at the historic mosque – in partnership with the British Library.

“This reminds us there was an earlier generation of Muslims, looking to spread the word of Islam through finding points in common rather than things to argue about,” said Timothy Winter, a prominent British Muslim scholar.

 

Winter, the dean of Cambridge Muslim College and lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, converted to Islam in 1979. He has worked extensively with the archives.

 

Britain’s first Muslim community mostly comprised English converts.

 

The Christmas scenes, described in every January issue of The Crescent, may come as a surprise.

 

Winter said the festivities demonstrated a willingness to appropriate local traditions, something that was easier because the group had grown up with them.

 

“They possessed a spirit of openness and hospitality and were more concerned with God and truth and conveying the word [as opposed to] boundary issues and questions of identity and difference,” Winter told Al Jazeera.

 

The Victorian Muslims were not celebrating Christmas in the Christian sense, said Humayun Ansari, professor and author of The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain since 1800.

 

They simply wanted to reach out to the community.

 

In doing so, Ansari said, Quilliam and the early British Muslims were “indigenising” their Muslim identities.

 

“What Quilliam is doing in these early examples is trying to communicate that Islam is more familiar to the Christians of Britain then they think. He is trying to show that it is not something foreign and alien, but part of the Abrahamic tradition,” Ansari told Al Jazeera.

 

“These early British Muslims were taking elements of British indigenous culture deemed acceptable within the Islamic framework and marrying them with their religious identities. In doing so, they offer a roadmap and blueprint for what an indigenous British Muslim identity might look like today.”

 

In addition to the mosque, the Muslims of Liverpool founded a school, orphanage and a museum

 

At school, students were taught a curriculum that integrated Islam with mainstream British education, including music classes.

 

They took part in literary and debating events titled A night with Charles Dickens, Oliver Cromwell and Ancient Britons.

 

In the playground, boys played football and cricket.

 

The Crescent newspaper, edited by Quilliam, regularly published inspiring quotes of notable Brits such as Shakespeare and Lord Tennyson.

 

Quilliam’s role and influence were such that he was given the title of Sheikh Ul Islam of Britain by the Ottomans, and when he left Liverpool in 1908, it seems his community disbanded too.

 

Today, there are more than 2.5 million Muslims in Britain and, unlike Quilliam’s community, they hail from a multitude of ethnic and cultural backgrounds and observe Islam differently.

 

“The Victorian Muslims were a small community, almost exclusively white English,” said Sadiya Ahmed, founder of Everyday Muslim – an organisation which preserves Britain’s Muslim heritage.

 

“Today, we have Muslims in Britain whose families have come from all over the world as well as those who are ethnically English, and this inevitably means they approach Christmas in a number of ways,” she told Al Jazeera.

 

The issue recently came to the fore when Tesco, a supermarket brand, released its festive advertising campaign featuring a Muslim family celebrating Christmas.

 

Critics threatened to boycott the company because they saw Islam as incompatible with Christmas.However, others welcome the advert as embracing multiculturalism

“Some [Muslims] will completely shun it as a Christian festival, believing it has nothing to do with Islam,” said Ahmed.”Others will embrace it as a secular British tradition, putting up trees, exchanging presents and eating a halal turkey on Christmas Day. And then there will be those viewing it as a celebration of the birth of an important prophet of Islam.”Britain’s Muslim community is far more diverse today than it was when Quilliam was alive, and this is why their views on Christmas are equally diverse.”

Picture: The Liverpool Muslim Institute was founded by the Liverpudlian William ‘Abdullah’ Quilliam [Courtesy: Abdullah Quilliam Society]

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/12/victorian-muslims-celebrate-christmas-171214134651020.html

 

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The Two Options: A Christian’s View…… submitted by Dr. Thomas Mathai

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So What is the Something That Must Have Always Existed?

There are only two options if we’re following the logic given in the cosmological argument.

  • Either the universe has always existed or
  • Something outside the universe has always existed

Scientific evidence shows us that the universe hasn’t always existed.

Here are some of the evidences that support that the universe did begin at a certain point of time:

1.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the amount of usable energy in a closed system, like in the case of the universe, is decreasing.

In other words, the amount of usable energy is dying out just like the batteries die in your flashlight.

If a closed system like the universe is in fact running out of energy, then the universe can’t be eternal because a finite amount of energy could never have brought the universe through an eternity of time.

2.  The Universe is Expanding

In 1929, Edwin Hubble, made a discovery that the universe is expanding.

Once scientists understood that the universe was expanding, they realized that it would have been smaller in the past.

At some point historically, the entire universe would have been a single point.

This point is what many people refer to as the Big Bang, which is the point when our universe began to exist.

3.  The Cosmic Background Radiation

Physics.org describes the Cosmic Background Radiation as, “The left-over heat from the fireball of the Big Bang in which the Universe was born 13.7 billion years ago.”

While the age of the earth is speculation by scientists, most do agree that the Cosmic Background Radiation does point to a finite universe that has a specific age.

So to recap, here’s the cosmological argument which offers proof for the existence of God:

Who Created God?

Atheists usually say that if we follow the logic in the argument, then God must have had a creator too.

I used to bring up this objection to those who believed in God when I was an atheist.

However, the cosmological argument only states that everything that came into existence must have a cause.

God didn’t come into existence, He always was, is, and will forever be.

The cosmological argument points to the first cause of the universe as Someone that has always existed.

That is a part of the argument.

The argument points that there must be something that did not have a cause.

But Wait, Maybe that Eternal Creator isn’t God

Most atheists, if they concede that yes, there must be an eternal first cause to the universe, then they’ll say that we don’t know what it is.

They’ll says that science is still making new discoveries every day.

Therefore, they’ll say that there could be other life forms out there that we don’t know about yet, and maybe they are the ones that created the universe.

READ  How is God Glorified When People Don’t Respond to the Gospel?

God vs. Aliens (other life forms)

The bottom line is that there is no concrete evidence that other life forms exist.

You can tell me about the climate of Mars, or about Kepler-186f, and I’ll again say that there’s no concrete evidence that other life forms exist on those planets or anywhere else.

On the other hand, the evidence for the Christian God is much more concrete.

Why?

When we look at how Christianity spread after the death and resurrection of Jesus, we notice something that’s both fascinating and unique.

This unique thing is that the apostles and early followers of Jesus weren’t just martyred for their faith, most of them were tortured first before they were killed.

This is documented in historical books that are written by authors outside of the Bible, authors such as Josephus and Tertullian.

The reason that the torture and death of the first followers of Jesus is so significant, is because they were tortured for saying that they had witnessed the risen Christ.

You might be thinking, “So what? Hundreds of people die for their beliefs everyday.”

But hold on for a just a minute, there’s a huge difference.

The 12 apostles of Jesus

The first followers of Jesus were tortured and martyred for saying that they saw Jesus resurrected

Hundreds of people die everyday because they believe that their religion is true.

However, nobody is willing to die for a false testimony.

Did you notice the difference between these two?

If the apostles and early Christians were lying about seeing the risen Christ, then as soon as they would’ve experienced persecution and torture, then surely they would have changed their false testimony.

They would have said, “Sorry, we’re lying about seeing the risen Christ.  Please stop torturing us and let us go.”

But none of them withdrew their testimonies, they were tortured until death, and they maintained that they had seen the resurrected Jesus.

Why would so many people be willing to do die for a false testimony?

Do you know anyone that’s willing to die for giving a false testimony in court?

The answer is no.

That’s why this is one of the most compelling evidences for Christianity being an accurate belief system.

Wait, a Universe From Nothing is Possible, Says Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss and Others

Sometimes atheists will bring up M-theory, or the multiverse, citing that it’s possible for a universe to be created from nothing.

M-theory is a theory that says that there’s either an infinite or finite amount of universes.

Since there are so many universes, then one of them must be fine-tuned to sustain life.

In Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design, Hawking Writes, “Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.“

Both Hawking and Lawrence Krauss propose that it’s theoretically possible for the universe to have come from nothing using M-theory, string theory, and quantum physics to do away with God as being the creator.

However, there are major flaws to M-theory, and there are a number of respected physicists who point out these flaws.

Some physicists have gone as far as saying that M-theory isn’t even a science, it’s a pseudoscience.

Problems With M-Theory and a Multiverse

1.  M-theory requires the law of gravity and gravity is not “nothing.”  It’s “something.”

Any supporters of M-theory need to alter the definition of the word “nothing” to support their view.

Nothing is no-thing, it’s the state of non-being.

Scientific laws describe what happens under certain conditions and they need something to work on.

You can be sure that gravity isn’t nothing, it’s something.

2.  There is no evidence for a multiverse existing.

There isn’t much to be said here.  If there was evidence to support this theory, there wouldn’t be such a debate.

There is no observable evidence for an infinite, or even a finite number of universes existing.

3.  When physicists talk about “nothing”, they are talking about a quantum vacuum.  But there’s a problem.

A quantum vacuum is not nothing.

A quantum vacuum does have the properties of “something” as Dr. Alexander Vilenkin points out in this video.

If you’re interested in reading more about M-theory, the multiverse, and related topics, I recommend you check out this article by Focus.org, or this article by Professor John Lennox.

What Would the Universe Look like without God?

A universe without God wouldn’t exist, and you wouldn’t exist either if there was no God.

the Lord is the one who made us

This is my belief and personal conviction.

I used to think otherwise when I was an atheist, but now, I have peace knowing that I have a relationship with God, the creator of heaven and earth.

I shared with you my beliefs and I’d love to hear about yours.

Do you believe in God? Why or why not?

Limits Of Science & Human Brain

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(An other article on how far science can take us and limits of our brain to understand. How do we know we understand? Article is by Martin Rees, a professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics. f. sheikh)

But I think science will hit the buffers at some point. There are two reasons why this might happen. The optimistic one is that we clean up and codify certain areas (such as atomic physics) to the point that there’s no more to say. A second, more worrying possibility is that we’ll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. There might be concepts, crucial to a full understanding of physical reality, that we aren’t aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends Darwinism or meteorology. Some insights might have to await a post-human intelligence.

Scientific knowledge is actually surprisingly ‘patchy’ – and the deepest mysteries often lie close by. Today, we can convincingly interpret measurements that reveal two black holes crashing together more than a billion light years from Earth. Meanwhile, we’ve made little progress in treating the common cold, despite great leaps forward in epidemiology. The fact that we can be confident of arcane and remote cosmic phenomena, and flummoxed by everyday things, isn’t really as paradoxical as it looks. Astronomy is far simpler than the biological and human sciences. Black holes, although they seem exotic to us, are among the uncomplicated entities in nature. They can be described exactly by simple equations.

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