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Intellectual Pursuits May Create Brain Synapses
Bacteriophage writes "There's an interesting news scoop at Science Daily in which some neuroscientists have linked professions to 'brain power.' This may seem to some of you as obvious, the question is if people in 'intellectually stimulating' professions are smart the way they are because of 'nature or nurture,' whether or not they are predestined to take the careers they do, or possibly new synapses are being formed due to on-the-job stimulation."
Just about everyone here has been making the same mistake - they've been equating ability in one area (generally abstract thinking - I mean hey, we're all programmers/thinkers/etc here at /.) with `intelligence'. This isn't just narrow minded - it's plain wrong.
If things were that simple, then how would you rate my Dad's old friend, who's one of the best diesel mechanics you're likely to find - I could `think' rings around him, but I sincerely doubt I could ever be as good a mechanic as him. My ability to think effectively in the abstract doesn't translate particularly well into grasping what's going wrong with a complex piece of machinery that pretty much has a mind of it's own. His ability to understand how bits of the physical world interact with each other doesn't necessarily translate well into grasping how a program works.
Abstract thinking is wonderful stuff, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of the world. The basic assumption behind many of these posts, that the kind of abstract thinking that we all do, all the time, and often get payed lots of money to do, is somehow the only form of intelligence worthy of the name is fundamentally wrong.
To get back on topic . . .
This research doesn't say anything about a causal link between high numbers of synapses in the brain and in intellectually challenging job. Neither does it say anything about the converse.
What the research seems to show (according to the report - I haven't read the original paper) is that people in some types of jobs (engineers and teachers were the examples cited) have higher numbers of synapses in a particular part of the brain. Not the whole brain, merely a particular part. What this suggests to me (though I'm not a neuroscientist) is that that particular part of the brain is primarily where the kind of abstract thinking that engineers/teacher/thinkers in general tend to do takes place. Since I'm not a neuroscientist or pshycologist or anything of that ilk I can't comment on how these results relate to current models of brain function, but I wouldn't be surprised if these were quite important findings - researchers don't normally get excited about stuff that's not important.
Whatever the case, it'd be a really good idea if people got over this - yes you're intelligent and yes you probably have the same kind of synaptic complexity that these people are talking about, but Who Cares!!! It doesn't mean anything in the real world. The only real way to judge intelligence is by what it does, not by how many brain cells made it happen.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
The laziness you mention is just one manifestation of our "gimme-gimme, now-now" culture. Nobody wants to bother to read the manual. Nobody wants to actually have to learn anything. Delayed gratification is as welcome in the general populace as it is in your average two-year-old.
Computer use has been reduced to an unskilled labor position. That sounds funny, doesn't it? But of course, many of you doubtless say, using a computer is unskilled labor position. Surely I'm not suggesting that it ever was, or that it should be?
Why, yes; that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Think about it. It wasn't all that long ago that you'd have been regarded as either a starry-eyed lunatic or a hopeless simpleton if you had suggested that computer programming, computer administration, or computer use should be counted as unskilled labor, requiring no prior skills or special training. Today, the reverse of this occurs. To suggest that there's anything to it is to foster "elitism", a verbal icon for the tired old idea that hard work and genuine skill can ever produce more competence than can sloth and slackery. Sorry, but it's true.
What's pushing this insanity is the market economy (and the media culture). The pressure to demonstrate stellar revenue growth on each and every corporate quarterly report drives those who pander software to do completely stupid things. They have to sell their goods to people who are completely and utterly unskilled. Why? Because there are more of them, and they've got money, that's why.
Vendors cannot require even average intelligence for the learning and use of their software, lest half their market be cut off from them. Consequently, they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use, thereby restricting all of us to a childish level of interaction with our computers. It's embarrassing. Welcome to America.
It's like trying to read only comic strips and calling this literature. It's insulting. Yes, it takes time, work, and dedication to learn to read well enough to handle the Great Books rather than mere comic strips. But it's also worth it. Reduced to a level a discourse that even a quasi-illiterate child could fathom, our entire society suffers, leaving us all impoverished.
This zero-learning-curve principle for software is hardly the only force driving software manufacturers to previously unimaginable levels of idiocy, but it's a critically important, and the one which explains your own observation. Other factors include the notion that customer is always right, that more features are better, that software can in later releases have post-design features haphazardly accreted onto it like a child's fort at a junkyard, that flexible tools are only for professionals, that it's better to get a bad product out now than a good product out later, and that lack of backwards compatibility drives sales.
Our society is, as you indirectly observe, full of lazy people. They don't want to work for anything. They just want it handed to them on a silver platter, already raised and slaughtered and packaged and cooked and salted and cut up into bite-sized pieces to feed to their kiddies--and themselves.
Well, I've got sad news. Computers require skills. They do not produce jobs for unskilled laborers. But with books on the market with titles remarkably close to "Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in Five Days", or "How to Be a Concert Pianist in Ten Hours of Easy Listening", or "Wiring Your Backplane for Dummies", or "Become an Air-Traffic Controller Overnight", you see what's going on.
Computers aren't for the unskilled. It's not a television. It's not a garage door opener. Sure, you can get those things, but that's just the tip of the iceberg--the iceberg that's going to sink your boat. You can't be a systems adminstrator without prior skills. You certainly can't be a programmer without developing some serious skills. You can't even adminstrate a computer without developing serious skills.
Yet nary a day passes me by that someone whose idea of computers is limited to Word Perfect or Microsoft Word comes to me and effectively asks, "How can I use Perl to program my CGI script to handle a multistage shopping cart with distributed database connectivity, animated vector graphics, secure transactions, robustness in the face of complete systems failure, and online credit card verification -- and which scales to a thousand hits per second?" They have absolutely no programming background whatsoever. I gently (or sometimes, ungently) explain that you can't possibly teach them enough in a day, or three, for them to be able to do this, and no, there is no online tutorial either.
"But surely, computers are easy!" they retort. "The Web is therefore easy. Programming must be easy, too." This whole exchange really pisses them off. They've heard all this from millions of adverts, that anybody can do any of this, and that anybody can get rich quick without years of study. They've heard it so often that they're sure that those few of us who tell them otherwise must necessarily be lying to them. They saw it on TV, so it must be true, and we "professionals" (sorry, that's the old word; the new word is "elistist"; same thing) have to feeding them a line of bull to protect our own income streams.
When someone can't even manage to use Legos, they'll never be able to construct a skyscraper in a day or three of study. You just can't get there from here. Why do they think they should be able to? Because of the Big Lie that anyone can do anything they want with computers without learning squat. Without working. Instantly.
There's a reason people go to school for years to learn this kind of thing, and have professional internships to develop job skills. You can't just expect an illiterate street person to do this job. But people do. They really do. They think managing a computer (being a sysadmin) must be as easy as putting gas in their car, and that programming one must be as easy as adding oil to that car. Well, it isn't. This isn't unskilled labor. It never will be. Time to burst their bubble. This is the kinder thing to do than giving them false expectations of something for nothing.
It will, not, of course, happen. Corporate greed and sound-byte media coverage will see to it that the lies are left intact. But nobody will ever be happy, because lies remain lies.