PINNING DOWN POTENTIAL 27with ge ne tics, scholars and prac ti tion ers, as well as the media and gen-
eral public, have been subjected to a stream of promissory notes laced
with hyperbole. So an article in Th e Psychologist (March 2013), a journal
of the British Psychological Society, tells us about “power ful methods”
yielding “power ful insights” from a “bright new approach” through which
“substantial insights may not be far away.”
As with the ge ne tics of intelligence, big promises about cracking the
mystery of the brain, with great implications for intervention, have duly
led to funds being poured into ambitious proj ects. Th e Eu ro pean Union’s
Human Brain Proj ect, for example, has an estimated bud get of €1.2 billion.
Its remit is to build a computer that, by emulating the human brain, will
reveal the secrets of intelligence. Th is, it is said by the proj ect leaders, will
reveal “fundamental insights into what it means to be human.”
Again, over the past twenty years, the area has been boosted by bril-
liant technological advances. Th e most popu lar tool has been the brain
scan: more specifi cally, the functional magnetic resonance imaging
(f MR I) scan. Th is technique puts participants into a huge cylindrical
chamber crossed with magnetic fi elds. Th e individual can remain at rest
or be asked to engage in some prob lem- solving activity. Th e relative
amount of oxygenated blood fl owing to diff er ent parts of the brain is then
indicated in X- ray- type pictures and is assumed to refl ect localized dif-
ferences in neural activity.
No one can doubt the extra dimension the technique has brought
to studies of the brain, especially in medicine, and in providing evocative
pictures of its activities and connectivities. But serious misgivings
arise when the technology is applied to questions of human potential.
Th e usual aim is to correlate levels of activity or anatomical volume in
diff er ent individuals with diff er ent levels of IQ. Such correlations are
taken to indicate how diff erences in IQ are caused by diff erences in brain
tissue quality, in turn due to diff erences in the quality of genes. Th en
follows—as with the genes for IQ research— the next step in the argu-
ment: that telling teachers what kind of “brain” a child has will help them
improve their teaching of that child.
Typical of this approach is that of Richard J. Haier. In an interview
with the National Institute for Early Education Research, he was described
as “a cutting- edge researcher on human intelligence whose work with
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