Your Brain vs Genius Brain - How Do They Compare

[0:00]Our brain is the command center for the nervous system, the organ that ensures we're conscious and can experience life. It receives input from our five senses, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, and it sends output commands to the muscles. The human brain weighs about 3.3 pounds, contains roughly 86 billion nerve cells, and billions of nerve fibers. These neurons contain trillions of connections or synapses. The brain is a complex living computer, but are all brains built the same? That's what we'll be looking at in this episode of the Infographics Show. How genius brains are different from our own. Intelligence is one of the key measures for being a genius. So before we answer this question, let's first look at what intelligence is and how it actually can be measured. The definition of intelligence itself is not an entirely firm definition. There are a number of ways of measuring it: academic intelligence, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, or even artistic intelligence just to name a few. And even when you look at something such as academic intelligence, it can be subdivided further into areas such as analytical skill, reading comprehension, and problem solving. So at first glance, it's not all that straightforward. However, regardless of the lens through which you view intelligence, people across these various categories who have a higher level of intelligence tend to be able to navigate the challenges of life better than those individuals deemed to have a cognitive deficit. And this brings us to IQ. IQ stands for intelligence quotient, and it's a total score derived from several standardized tests, designed to assess human intelligence. While an IQ test is not the perfect measure of a person's intelligence, some scientific studies have looked at brain activity of people with high IQ scores and can provide some useful insight into what makes intelligence. So how then, if we start by using IQ as a measure, do we define a genius? One of the more famous studies was by Lewis Terman, the Stanford University psychologist who helped pioneer the IQ test. Terman believed this test that captured intelligence would also reveal genius. So in the 1920s, he began tracking more than 1500 Californian school kids with IQ's above 140. This was a threshold that he labeled as near genius or genius. He wanted to see how they fared in life by comparing them with other children. He followed the children for their lifetimes and mapped their success in a series of reports known as the genetic studies of genius. What did Terman discover? The main discovery he made was that above average intelligence is on its own no guarantee of monumental achievement. A number of the participants struggled with success, despite the fact that they were overachievers on the IQ scale. Several dozen dropped out of college, but others from the test group with IQ's that weren't high enough to make the cut, grew up to become masters in their field. Most notably were Lewis Alvarez and William Shockley, both of whom won Nobel prizes in physics. Other interesting research studies have shown that people who have an above average IQ use different regions of the brain will solving tasks than people with an average score on the IQ scale. One of the earlier studies from Slovenia showed that people who had an IQ above 127, which is considered highly intelligent, were more efficiently able to use different regions of the brain when solving tasks. But maybe being a genius is not as simple as how high your IQ score is. And there's more behind the great minds of people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Mozart, Tolstoy, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Curry, and Einstein to really understand the difference between the brain of a genius and that of our own. We need to dive inside the minds of some of these people. Luckily, scientists have studied the brains of a few of them. Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity. One of the greatest minds ever born. When Einstein died on the 18th of April in 1955, Thomas Stoltz Harvey took his brain without the permission of his family. It was preserved, dissected, photographed, and even mailed to other scientists in hopes that studying it might reveal the mystery of his genius. Over the years that followed, several interesting features of his brain were discovered. There were more extensive connections between the two hemispheres of his brain. It was lighter than average weight, and part of the brain known as the lateral sulcus was enlarged, as was the area dedicated to mathematical and spatial thought, which is maybe not such a surprise with Einstein's achievements. His brain is still around to be seen today. If you'd like to take a peek, it's one of the permanent exhibitions of the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I think, therefore, I am, are words made famous by French philosopher René Descartes, and another genius brain that's been studied. In mathematics, Descartes invented the Cartesian plane, allowing algebraic ideas to be expressed geometrically. Descartes died in 1650, and so his brain is long forgotten. However, scientists recently analyzed the shape of his skull, looking for clues as to how his brain shape might have differed from yours or ours. Using a CT scan, they saw that his skull looked pretty normal until they found a bulge in the frontal lobe area, which may correlate to the part of the brain responsible for applying words to abstract notions. So again, these abnormalities in the shape and behavior of the brain may be the difference between geniuses and our own brain. Michael Michalko, the author of the book Cracking Creativity, says that the difference between genius and ordinary is that the genius simply knows how to think, instead of what to think. If you're focusing on the how, then you have time to create new concepts that are entirely innovative. That's how scientists such as Einstein have been able to think up complex equations to model how the universe operates. You could say a genius looks at a problem in a different way than most people do, and combines thoughts, images and ideas into different patterns that occur in the world, and that most of us don't see. A great example is Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian genius who lived over 500 years ago, and whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. Da Vinci connected a bell ringing to a flat stone hitting the water and causing waves. This conclusion led him to think that sound like water also traveled in waves. He was, of course, correct. Can we really tell if people are geniuses by the shape of their brain, or are there many other factors at play such as IQ and education, or is it all just down to chance? Let us know in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other video, Weirdest brain disorders. Thanks for watching, and as always, please don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time.