Are we USING our INTELLIGENCE?
When natural intelligence
is unused, underused, abused, and misused, rather than used, it is now time for
artificial intelligence to take up the lead.
The Situation Unfolds
One
day I was walking to my friend’s place. I was dressed normally and there was a
man in rags walking in front of me. A dog came running and started barking at
him. It looked at me but did not bark. I was quite surprised about this situation
and I forgot all about it.
Later,
when I was talking to another friend, he was praising his dog and said dogs are
quite intelligent. I narrated the incident where the dog did not bark at me but
barked at the man in rags.
This
made my friend sit up and he started talking animatedly about other virtues of
dogs. He said dogs are so intelligent that they can distinguish between a good
guy and a bad guy; a person who is reliable as against an untrustworthy person.
This set
me to think.
How do
the dogs know who is a good guy or a bad one?
Does the
attire determine the quality of a person?
Are dogs
as intelligent as human beings that they are capable of knowing who is good and
who is bad?
Or is it
that we humans use so much intelligence as dogs that we can’t go beyond the
distinction of a well-dressed person against an ill-dressed person?
When a stranger
wearing a suit comes to our house we invite him inside before asking him who he
is. On the other hand, if a man in rags comes near the house, then we think
that he wants something from us, and we are ready to send him away. We open the
gates to the stranger and close the gates to the latter.
Are we
capable of judging him beyond what he is wearing?
Or are
we trying to act as if we are intelligent, though, in reality, we are just
using the same amount of intelligence as that of a dog?
Our Socialization Process
How do
we acquire this habit of trusting someone based on their dress?
The
answer lies in our socialization process.
Most of the people we know and interact with daily, dress the way we do.
We see people in rags as out of the range of our social circle.
Children
encounter them only in the streets and not anywhere in schools, buses, hotels,
malls, and other places that they frequent. They develop a stereotype that
these people are to be kept outside of everyday interaction.
Is it
not the same thing that the dog has learned, too?
We take
a few years to learn what it has learned in a few months! Yet we consider human
beings to be more intelligent than dogs!
A thief
or a robber can get away easily if he learns to dress well. Not only dogs do
not bark at him nor chase him, but we too seem to entertain that person.
If we
cannot use our intelligence to find out something beyond the way one is dressed
up, then why are we ascribing ourselves with a greater amount of wisdom,
tolerance, ‘love thy neighbor’, empathy, succor, and hundreds of other words that
the dog has very little meaning for?
The man
in old rags minds his business in his very own small way and he does not want
what we have but we are afraid that he will ask for it. The people whom we
trust always want something from us and we let them in, only to be misguided
and cheated by the so-called well-dressed people!
All
confidence tricksters who cheat people are always well-dressed because they
know how gullible people are. Nevertheless, we still haven’t learned lessons
from it and continue to show respect based on dress.
And yet
we certify ourselves as being more intelligent than the dog!
Either
we have learned a lot from the dogs or we have failed to learn beyond the
primordial ways of reacting to circumstances.
If we were to make a list of what a dog does daily (whether the dog is
tamed or not, matters little), and if we substitute the word ‘dogs’ for ‘humans’
and the word ‘food’ for ‘money or power’, then are we doing something different
from the dog or other animals in the wild?
What Is This Intelligence?
Is it
the ability to score good marks in the examination, or is it the way we deal
with people?
Neither answer
is completely true.
Intelligence
is defined by Robert Feldman (2021) as “the capacity to understand the world,
think rationally, and use resources effectively when faced with challenges.”
A better
definition is provided by David Wechsler (1896-1981) as “the global capacity of
a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with
his environment.”
In
almost all definitions, rational thinking has been emphasized but usually, our
thinking is clouded by irrationality like beliefs, superstitions, bias,
prejudices, and stereotypes.
The weight
of the human brain is 1300 to 1400 grams as against 72 grams of the dog’s brain
weight. The ratio of brain weight to body weight in dogs is 1:125 whereas in
humans it is 1:40. The Encephalization Quotient (EQ, which takes into
consideration the body weight, the cephalization factor, and the average
mammalian value) of dogs is 1.17 while that of human being is 7.44.
According
to Dr. Colin Groves (1942-2017), domestication of dogs not only shrank the size
of the dogs’ brains but also disabled certain regions of the brain (like mid-brain
and olfactory bulbs) in human beings.
Have we
been learning from dogs for the last several thousand years and losing our
intelligence?
Losing Without Using
Are we
wasting over 100 billion nerve cells in our brains?
How much
of it are we using?
Should
we learn to use more of our inherent capacity or should we continue to learn
from animals?
Research
indicates that when humans start depending on animals they gradually develop deficits
in the areas of the brain both structurally and functionally. My experience has
indicated that the more we depend on tools, technology, and gadgets, the more
we lose out on our brain capacity. For instance, depending on the calculator to
do arithmetic may increase our speed and accuracy.
However,
have we ever thought of the cost?
Without
a calculator, we are unable to calculate! We see such trends in the Western
world nowadays: without a machine, no one does any transaction because people
cannot calculate. The fact that people have been searching for an answer
on “Google Search” to the question “What is 15% of 100?” means that there is
something seriously wrong with their upbringing.
Testing Brain Functions
We use
neuropsychological tests that can determine whether a particular region of the brain
is being used or not. Most of these tests are used to measure the extent of
brain damage but when the same tests were administered to normal children, we
found glaring deficiencies existing in the brain development. Brain dysfunction
is usually due to brain injury, chemical imbalance, toxicity, emotional
imbalance, psychological disorders, or degeneration of brain cells as in Alzheimer’s
disease. On the other hand, it could be simply because we have stopped using
the brain.
Though
children are inherently capable of learning verbal, perceptual, memory,
conceptual, constructional, and executive functions in addition to finite motor
performance, orientation, and attention, their learning depends upon
environmental stimulation. Our research has shown time and again that many
children lack school readiness, have reading and learning problems, possess
emotional difficulties, and do not reach developmental milestones. The child’s
ability is not in question but the system we are adhering to is costing the
future generation.
We
are already seeing its consequences in children and adults trying to commit
suicide, getting into addiction, showing criminal behavior, killing innocent
people (including running amok and terrorism), etc.
The
greater the variety in stimulation, the greater the development of the brain
and consequently, intelligence.
We need
to ask ourselves a serious question:
Are we
providing such varied experiences, challenges, and opportunities for our
children to grow so that their intelligence increases?
Having a Pocketful Of Money And Starving To Death
It is
not a question of having or not having intelligence but of how much intelligence
we are using. The more we depend on someone or something, the more we make stereotypical
responses. All connections in the brain are electrochemical. The fewer the
connections the less our ability to use intelligence.
Howard
Gardner propounds eight types of intelligence: musical, bodily-kinesthetic,
logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and
naturalist. J. P. Guilford proposes 150
intellectual abilities that are used regularly.
Imagine
for a moment that all the traffic in the city is diverted to a single highway. The
result would be a traffic jam, greater wear and tear, wastage of time, inability
to use resources, and so on. There is always a similar perennial traffic jam in
our brains as we use the same set of neurons for most of our thinking. Though
we are endowed with billions of cells, we rarely use most of them.
The
following video reflects the situation the centennial generation is going
through and you can identify their lack of intelligence.
This is why there is now a need for developing and using artificial intelligence as the intelligence we are born with is being eroded day by day.
As one
of my mantras says,
Artificial
Intelligence will not take over our jobs
It will
only make us subservient and brainless
We are comfortable in believing what
others say without logically thinking about it.
We make
our life easier yet we rarely
use the time saved to face new challenges.
We are
content to assume that we
know enough without understanding the world the way it is.
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