“Nadie es capaz de señalar el lugar del cerebro dónde se desarrollan las buenas ideas.” This quote extracted from Miguel Delibes’ novel, from the fifties, ‘El Camino’, reflects how the brain has long-time been known to be the organ where intelligence inhabits, though no one has ever been able to precisely allocate where those ‘good ideas’ come from. The uncertainty surrounding this brain-intelligence dimension will consequently be exposed and discussed.
Professor Hunt probably makes the most astute and clever analogy that can be thought of in order to explain graphically how the brain works. He compares the brain to an orchestra. Initially, the author explains how the size of the orchestra influences the quality of the ensemble, …show more content…
The removal of a specific area of the brain, that is the reflection of the deletion of a single player of the orchestra, would affect the activity of the brain but it would not impair it dramatically, in other words, the orchestra would still sound but not in the same way. Besides, the sound varies more with the piece being played than with the quality of the orchestra, similarly to the brain activation that varies more with the action than with the individual. (Hunt, 2011)
The conception about the function and importance of the brain has strongly evolved across history. Already in the ancient Greece, huge curiosity existed regarding the brain. Aristotle (384-322 B.C) believed that it was not the brain but the heart the one containing the mind and so regulating both emotions and thinking (QUOTE). Long afterwards, René Descartes (1596-1650) conceptualised a mind-body dualism (QUOTE) that reflected a separation between the brain and the body, but he never achieved the understanding that the brain was the “home of the mind”. Phrenology already opened the way to believe that there were some …show more content…
It is important to mention that only six out of the forty areas studied were common to the three studies (Hunt, 2011, p.188).
On the other hand, Professor Richard Haier reviewed studies and found a correlation between the volume of some brain areas and intelligence. Again, there was only one area, the left inferior parietal lobe, common to the 50% of the studies revised (Hunt, 2011,