Posts Tagged ‘Intelligence’

SES Status, Health, and the IQ Connection

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

I first ran across the health-socioeconomic status (SES) gradient in a Discover Magazine article about 10 years ago.  (Sapolsky, Robert. “How the Other Half Heals” Discover. April, 1998 pp 46-52)  Researchers have found that there is a positive relationship between status and health that holds across ages, races, genders, time periods, societies, and diseases.  The effect is so persistent that even identical medical treatments for the same medical conditions of equal severity show the same SES gradient in outcomes.  Just to be clear, the phenomenon that the researchers are interested in isn’t occurring between countries, because, past a certain level of national wealth, the differences flatten out.  What is of interest here is what is occurring within countries, between the different SES levels.  Numerous theories have been proposed to try to explain why this gradient keeps occurring. 

One school of thought holds that the direction of causation might be from poor health to low SES.  The idea is that poor physical or mental health could be causing poor job opportunities, and dysfunctional relationships, and thereby leading to low SES.  Another group of researchers suggest that poor intrauterine environments and/or inadequate childhood nutrition are major contributing factors.  Still another leading theory holds that low status, in and of itself, is the culprit.  This theory argues that as people rise in the status hierarchy their sense of self-control and self-esteem go up, and their sense of chronic stress goes down, which leads to better health.    

Part of the gap can be accounted for by differences in such health related factors as smoking, occupational related risks, alcohol use, high blood pressure, diet, exercise, quality of housing, exposure to pollution, social support, discrimination, crime, sun exposure, practicing safe sex, the stress of unemployment, and differential access to health care.  However, even after controlling for all these factors a significant part of the gap apparently persists.  One important set of studies, the Whitehall studies of British civil servants, showed the same pattern from the top to the bottom of the civil service hierarchy, even though all the persons in it had access to the same health care.  And it actually turns out that free health care, and government efforts at health education, don’t reduce the gap, but often widen it.      

A relatively new theory I find interesting has been proposed by Linda Gottfredson, who argues that one underlying explanatory variable is differences in IQ between the social classes.  The idea is that status correlates with IQ, and IQ correlates with health behaviors, so status will therefore correlate with health behaviors.  So, in effect, much of the SES health gradient is actually an IQ health gradient.  Supporting this idea, in one Scottish study, IQ scores at age 11 predicted the likelihood of survival to age 76.  And in an Australian veteran’s study, after controlling for other variables, each additional IQ point resulted in a 1% decrease risk of death by age 40. 

Gottfredson argues that much of what matters for health is determined by the individual, and that, in the end, people are their own primary providers of health care.  Much of people’s health knowledge is a natural result of self-directed learning, and those who have more knowledge to begin with are in a better position to take advantage of new information as it comes along.   In one study, knowledge of 10 classes of health information had a 0.9 correlation with IQ.  And many small decisions over time can have big effects over many years. 

Self-care is growing increasingly complex as new technologies are developed, and this is analogous to a job that can’t be routinized.  IQ has been found to be especially useful when tasks are novel, complex, unpracticed, and situations are ambiguous, changing, or unpredictable.  New treatments, complex regimes, and anticipating and taking precautions against the unexpected are all cognitively demanding tasks.  She also argues that much the same reasoning applies to accident prevention, and that the same IQ gradient occurs in this case.  (She points out that post traumatic stress disorder and resilience in children follow this gradient too.) 

Lower SES persons don’t follow their treatment plans as well, and seek less preventive care, even when it is free.  Just looking at the population in general, in one study researchers found that 33% of all prescriptions are taken incorrectly.  In another study, 42% of patients couldn’t follow directions to take their medication on an empty stomach, and in still another, 60% of insulin dependent diabetics didn’t know the steps to take to correct their blood sugar levels.  About 10% of hospitalizations happen because patients don’t manage their prescriptions correctly, and 30% of patients are estimated to be taking their medication in a way that seriously threatens their health.  

Finally, attempts to remedy this situation have led to providing health information in simplified form.  The protocols call for simple vocabulary, the omission of all non-essential information, providing no theory, requiring no inferences, and giving all the information in specific step-by-step instructions.  All of these modifications are consistent with helping a population with limited general problem solving abilities, or, in other words, low IQ.    

(Unraveling the SES Health Connection by James P. Smith, Intelligence Predicts Health and Longevity, but Why? by Linda S. Gottfredson, Intelligence: Is It the Epidemiologists Elusive ”Fundamental Cause” of Social Class Inequalities in Health? by Linda S. Gottfredson, What epidemiology omits: IQ by Dennis Mangan, Social determinants of health- Wikipedia, Population Health-Wikipedia,  IQ, Socioeconomic Status, and Early Death, Can Patient self-management help explain the SES health gradient? Just Health by Norman Daniels, The Socioeconomic Gradient, or Why Do Some People Get Sick and Others Do Not?)

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The Myth of Creative Genius

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

I had a class in cognitive psychology in which we studied theories of how people go about thinking through problems.  One of the most interesting things we covered in the course of the class was that the way most people think about creativity is fundamentally confused. 

People typically think about creativity as being what is called a psychometric trait, similar to the way they think about math ability.  A trait exists when people have a fairly stable characteristic way of responding, performing, or being that consistently accounts for differences between them.  Introversion, IQ, and height are all examples of traits.  A problem with the view that creativity is a trait is that, unlike math, researchers have never been able to construct a reliable and valid test for it.  If a test isn’t reliable this means that when a given subject takes the same exact test twice over a period of time he/she will score inconsistently.  For example, they might score high the first time and then low the second; and this is what often happens with tests of creativity.  If a test isn’t valid then it isn’t measuring what it’s supposed to.  An extreme example of this would be if someone was mistakenly attempting to measure a person’s blood pressure using a glucose monitor.  The number they would get wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know, because you had measured the wrong thing.  This is also what happens with creativity tests.  When researchers gave a select group of highly regarded creative architects a large battery of tests, trying to discover what made them so creative, it turned out that there was no difference between their scores and their average non-highly-creative peer’s scores.   What this implies is that whatever it was that was making them creative wasn’t being captured by any of the tests the researchers had used.  

Partly as an outgrowth of these results, there has emerged a different view of what creativity involves.  This view holds that what people are seeing as the creative output of a genius is actually a kind of natural illusion.  That it is sort of like a mirage, and, just as with a mirage, there are a number of conditions which make this illusion likely to occur.  Creativity is typically associated with a person who is in a field that requires a fair bit of esoteric knowledge, or skills, or both.  The person has studied for many years.  They are gifted at that set of abilities that is relevant to the tasks of their field.  They are passionate about it, and hardworking at it.  When all these elements come together a person might produce a breakthrough of some sort: the theory of evolution, the periodic table, Mendel’s genetics of garden peas, Calder’s mobile, etc.  What follows next explains the illusion.  There is a crucial difference in how the peers of that person react and the public reacts.  The person’s peers, knowing the field as he/she does, often regard the breakthrough as a very clever piece of work, but one that is understandable.  A typical reaction might be, “Darn, I was so close!”  From the point of view of an uninformed audience member the view is very different.  What they see is a miracle.  “How could anyone ever have thought of that?  That person must have something extra, akin to a magical ability that I know I certainly don’t have.”  And this is how the theory of creativity was born. 

If we look briefly at what Calder had been exposed to before he came up with the mobile its creation seems, perhaps unfairly, almost inevitable.  He had seen mechanical self-animated toys, and applied the principles to creating his own miniature mechanical circus.  He had also been exposed to abstract shapes of Piet Mondrian.  Initially he put these two lines of artistic expression together, and created mechanical moving sculptures.  Finally, he eliminated the mechanical parts, and let the wind do the work of moving the shapes around.  Once you see all the precursing elements, the act of creation looks far less magical.  Although, to be fair, obviously when coming up with a new idea, it’s not nearly as obvious as it looks after the fact.

An analogy to a magic trick isn’t a bad one.  If you had an audience totally unfamiliar with stage magic, and a performer then proceeded to cut several women in half and levitate them, what would they think?  They might naturally conclude that this person had some special magical ability.  But, if now you were to take them up on stage and show them how the illusion worked, they would change their minds and say, “This is very clever, but it isn’t magic.  So, in the end the more you understand about a field, the less it looks like magic.  The more it looks like just clever and insightful problem solving, and not some sort of creative leap of imagination coming from some sort of special place that separates these people from the rest of humanity.

For further reading try: Creativity: Genius and other Myths, Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, and Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts, all by Robert W. Weisberg

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Alzheimer’s

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

In a previous blog I discussed the Cycad Hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, which postulates that excitotoxicity caused by BMAA toxin from cyanobacteria might be the root cause of the disease.  However, there are many other possibilities.

If I had an identical twin who had developed Alzheimer’s, I would consider everything I could think of to prevent it.   The short list would probably include:  I would eat a Paleolithic Diet, intermittently fast, practice good dental hygiene, exercise, take vitamin D supplements, folic acid, omega-3 fats, curcumin, Longevinex, green tea, and resveratrol.  I also would avoid STDs, concussion-risky sports, toxins, radon, electromagnetic fields, heavy cell phone use, and heavy metals. 

Come to think of it, this just sounds a lot like extremely healthy living.  Below are the details:

The disease has an obvious genetic component, since having a family history of Alzheimer’s increases your risk, as does having an identical twin with it (concordance is 59%).

A relatively new theory is that it is a third form of diabetes.  (Alzheimer’s could be diabetes-like illness, study suggests)  It turns out that the brain produces its own insulin.  In Alzheimer’s the brain’s insulin production, as well as its ability to respond to insulin, drops off as the disease becomes more severe.  Brain cells also lose the ability to respond to insulin growth factors, and when rats were treated with related insulin-like growth factors to correct for this lack of response the typical loss of learning and memory was prevented.  Regular diabetes itself is also a risk factor for the disease.

A moderate or severe concussion will roughly double your later risk of Alzheimer’s.  (Study bolsters head injury, Alzheimer’s link)  This is also true of mild repetitive head injuries.  (Fortunately isolated mild concussions don’t seem to increase your risk.) 

Besides avoiding head trauma, having a generally healthy cardiovascular system and avoiding atherosclerosis helps avoid the disease.  Having moderately high cholesterol and a diet higher in saturated fats are risk factors.  Atrial fibrillation makes it 44% more likely you will get it.  Cardiovascular disease increases your risk by 30%.  And if you’ve had a stroke your chances go up by nearly 50%.  Being obese, metabolic syndrome, and smoking during midlife all put you at greater risk.

Researchers suspect that early nutrition, as indicated by various body measurements, might play a role.  Women with short arms have a 50% greater risk, while a longer shin length is protective. 

Various viruses and microbes can worsen your chances.  Viruses in the herpes family (simplex I, Cytomegalovirus V, and simplex VI) are strongly suspected of being causal factors.  One theory holds that the microbe Chlamydia pneumonia might be the main agent responsible.  Lyme disease and Helicobacter pylori bacteria also are both associated with Alzheimer’s.  

A vasectomy might put men at risk for one rare form of dementia, Primary Progressive Aphasia.  

Vitamin D keeps proving its worth, since low levels of vitamin D have been linked to cognitive decline.  (See also Prevalence of vitamin d insufficiency in patients with Parkinson disease and Alzheimer disease)  

The inhaled anesthetics halothane and isoflurane are linked with amyloid beta buildup.  Childhood lead exposure could increase the risk.  Processed food that contains nitrates might be linked to Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and Parkinson’s.  Other possibilities include mercury, aluminum, and zinc exposure, non-wine alcohol consumption, and work related organic solvent exposure.

Although the lines of causation are far from clear, Alzheimer’s correlates with other mental problems.  Being lonely (an active social life is protective), having a history of depression, and having a major psychiatric illness all increase your chances of getting it. 

Additional correlating factors include:  having poor dental health, being exposed to air pollution,  a history of manual work, a family history of Parkinson’s, maternal age at birth, number of pregnancies, (possibly) exposure to low magnetic fields (Qiu et al, 2004) (Occupations with Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields: A Possible Risk Factor for Alzheimer’s Disease, Do Cell Phones Cause Alzheimer’s? By Maggie Spilner), and age.  There have also been concerns about radon’s radioactive daughter products being found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients at ten times the normal rate. (Alzheimer’s & Parkinson’s – Could the Cause be Radon?)  

In addition to the above list, here are some more controllable factors that people have suggested:  

Exercise has been shown to slow memory loss.

Dietary restriction and intermittent fasting seem to protect against a large variety of diseases, including Alzheimer’s.  (See also Extreme Diet Nixes Alzheimer’s)  A low carbohydrate and high fat diet has been shown to improve Alzheimer’s disease in mice.  In one study drinking fruit and vegetable juices cut risk by 76%.  The Mediterranean diet also seems to be protective.  Although I haven’t seen any studies on it, given all the lines of evidence I’m pointing out in this blog entry, I feel very confident in predicting that The Paleolithic Diet would be protective.

Having proper levels of folic acid reduces your risk by 55%, probably at least in part because of its effect on homocysteine levels.  Curcumin, which is found in the spice turmeric, appears to block amyloid plaques.  Many results suggest that the omega-3 fatty acid DHA is beneficial.  Silica in drinking water might help prevent the disease.  (See also Nature’s Way Silica Gel)  Huge doses of vitamin B3 have been found to stop the progression of Alzheimer’s in mice.  Marijuana has anti-inflammatory effects, and it might limit the memory loss part of it.  There is some speculation that Vitamin K2 could be beneficial.  Vitamin C and E consumption, coffee drinking, resveratrol, huperzine A, and wine consumption all might be somewhat protective.  (Since I am a teetotaler I’d consider using a product like Longevinex, which they claim has red wine’s benefits in a pill, without the alcohol or calories.)

Although it seems a bit extreme to suggest this as a preventive measure, Alzheimer’s does have an inverse association with cancer.  If this is true with those few cancers which are fully curable, and it were possible to somehow induce such a cancer, this suggests an unorthodox treatment option.

Looking in the doctor’s medicine cabinet, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, statins, antihypertensives (calcium antagonists), and vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and the flue all might be protective.

Academic ability is a protective factor which probably indicates that you aren’t as susceptible to the disease.  A Canadian study showed that bilingualism delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s by up to four years.  A lack of schooling and farm upbringing seems to boost your risk.  (Of course, the farm environment suggests the possibility of chemical exposure as an additional risk factor.) 

Researchers are making progress on possible ways to diagnose the disease at earlier stages:

It turns out that the disease manifests tell-tell signs years before it becomes apparent, and that lower levels of abstract reasoning and recall for verbal materials at a young age are good predictors for Alzheimer’s many years later.  One study, the “Nun Study,” has shown that certain aspects of language usage in young adults are 85%-90% accurate in predicting the disease 50 years later.  The rational for focusing on this population of women was that they lived very similar lives; so many possible confounding variables were eliminated.  Researchers found that linguistic features of the essays these women wrote when they were entering the convent, when analyzed properly, were strongly predictive.  They found that grammatical complexity tells how well a person’s memory is functioning, and “Idea density,” which is the number of discrete ideas per 10 written words, predicts educational level, vocabulary, and general knowledge.  It turns out that idea density at a young age is very predictive of Alzheimer’s in old age.   

Researchers have found that normally people do better on a memory test if the words to be remembered are semantically related.  But people who later develop Alzheimer’s don’t do any better at such tasks, suggesting that they no longer have access to deeper semantic meanings.  The same scientists have also found that implicit memory tests are good for diagnosing Alzheimer’s in its early stages.  In one test, participants were required to read words from a computer screen as quickly as possible.  For healthy people if a word is repeated they will be primed and perform better.  This effect doesn’t tend to happen with people who will later develop Alzheimer’s, indicating they aren’t learning implicitly (learning without the awareness of learning, or being primed) when they perform a task.   

Researchers have developed a technique that allows them to image beta amyloid plaques in living mice.  They did this by using a non-toxic compound that binds to the plaques, which is then visible when scanned by using MRI.  It might turn out not be necessary to go to such lengths, because researchers have discovered that beta amyloid proteins also build up in the eye lenses of patients.  It therefor seems likely that a simple eye test will someday be available for the disease.  Some researchers speculate that it might be possible to develop a saliva test which would be able to detect Alzheimer’s.

As for what medicine might eventually have to offer:

British scientists claim that an experimental drug called Rember, which attacks the tangles that form during the disease, can reduce Alzheimer’s progression by about 80%.   In a small study, the anti-inflammatory arthritis drug Etanercept demonstrated remarkable benefits in patients.  Researchers are now testing a patch which delivers a vaccine that causes the immune system to break down beta Amyloid proteins.  If used early in the disease, the epilepsy drug Valproic Acid (VPA) has been shown to reverse memory loss, by inhibiting the production of these proteins.  A drug tested in the UK and Singapore, Methylthioninium chloride (MTC), blocks the accumulation of tau tangles inside brain cells, and slows the progress of the disease by 81%.  Dimebon, a Russian antihistamine, which seems to improve the functioning of mitochondria, stabilized Alzheimer’s in an 18 month study.  In Australia they have developed a drug PBT2 that attacks plaques.  Exelon, a cholinesterase inhibitor, seems to delay development of the disorder.  Researchers have found that they can increase the expression in the brain of the protein transthyretin, which seems to halt the progression of the disease.

Getting further into what sounds like science fiction, there is an experimental helmet which bathes the brain with infra-red light, which it is claimed stimulates the growth of brain cells and could reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms.  Finally, researchers have been experimenting with trepanation, drilling a hole in your head, on the theory that this increases cranial compliance.  This is the elasticity of the brain’s vascular system, and the theory is that increasing this will in turn increase blood flow to the brain. 

Here is an on-line article by William R. Ware that discusses many of the suspected causes that might be involved, in addition to the ones I have listed, they include: emotional stress, oxidative stress, vitamin deficiency, vitamin b12 deficiency, hypotension, hypertension, alcohol abuse, pesticides, and herbicides, low antioxidant levels, and a tendency for thrombosis.  (See also memory and cholesterol, low levels of cholesterol)  He also reviews the relative risk reduction of a number of drugs currently used to treat Alzheimer’s.  What the more successful drugs seem to have in common is antiangiogenic activity, or the inhibition of new vascularization.  Natural compounds which might have antiangiogenic activity include Omega-6 fatty acids, green tea, licorice, quercetin, squalamine, and shark cartilage.

Here are two positively reviewed books:  The Alzheimer’s Answer: Reduce Your Risk and Keep Your Brain Healthy by Marwan Sabbagh, which, at 330 pages, covers a lot of material; and Beyond Alzheimer’s: How to Avoid the Modern Epidemic of Dementia (Hardcover) by Scott D. Mendelson (See also: Beyond alzheimer’s – summary)

Finally, The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis by Peter J. Whitehouse provides a contrarian view of the disease.

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Myopia, Reading, Diet, Brain Size, and IQ

Friday, July 31st, 2009

One commonly accepted theory about what causes myopia is that the near point focus involved in reading in genetically susceptible individuals causes them to become nearsighted.  From what I have read this is almost certainly part of the explanation. 

But there is still more to this story.  Non-literate populations have roughly 1% nearsightedness, compared with developed countries in Europe and the United States, with rates of about 30%, and rates as high as 80% in developed Asian countries.  Normally when a country begins to industrialize, and the kids are put in school and therefore reading all day, the levels go up to the developed countries’ rates.  This is what happened to Eskimos.  However, one South Pacific Island, Vanuatu, in the 1980s had children in school all day long, and yet their rate of myopia was still only 1.3%.  What explains the difference is that their traditional diet hadn’t changed.  What appears to be happening is that glycemic spikes, which occur when people eat high index glycemic foods, lead to chronic hyperinsulinaemia.  This condition affects the hormones in the eye as it develops, which causes it to become myopic.   So at the end of the day you need three things to become myopic:  the gene(s) that make you susceptible, near point focus work, and a high glycemic diet. 

You might conclude from all this that it’s a bad thing to have the gene(s) which make you susceptible to myopia, but there’s another side to that part of the story.  It turns out that those children who become very nearsighted at a young age have about 7-8 points higher IQs.  Apparently it isn’t a case of smarter children reading more and becoming nearsighted as a result.  The eyes of these children are slightly larger at birth, and people with higher IQs have slightly larger brains when you control for such things as body size.  The back of the eye is considered part of the brain, and it seems that whatever the gene(s) are doing is affecting both the eyes and the brains of the people who have them.  Myopic children also have different values, language abilities, and sports participation patterns than non-myopics.  So there’s a tradeoff.  The genes that make you susceptible to myopia also make you smarter.  

If there’s a lesson to be learned from all this it’s that people were designed to eat a low glycemic, ideally Paleolithic Diet, and when we don’t we create problems for ourselves.

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Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Dweck’s message is that the difference between success and failure is often persistence, and a willingness to take chances.  The underlying reason for these differences often comes from the fact that people differ in their goals when they approach a task.  If the goal is performance, or to look smart and be successful at that task, then the person encountering difficulties will tend to give up.  If the goal is mastery, or to learn something, then that person will be willing to take risks and suffer setbacks because each failure is seen as a chance to learn.  

So why do people have these different goals in the first place?  In her book (drawing on attribution theory, which is concerned with how people judge the causes of events) “Dweck proposes that everyone has either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is one in which you view your talents and abilities as… well, fixed…. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one in which you see yourself as fluid, a work in progress…. The good news, says Dweck, is that mindsets are not set: at any time, you can learn to use a growth mindset to achieve success and happiness.” 

“All students participated in sessions on study skills, the brain and the like; in addition, one group attended a neutral session on memory while the other learned that intelligence, like a muscle, grows stronger through exercise.”  Students at both ends of the talent spectrum can get caught in the trap of thinking that ability is all that counts.  The attitude is, “You’ve got it or you don’t.”  Either way why bother working hard at it?

I think Dweck’s analysis is somewhat off the mark.  Whenever I’ve heard some very successful person interviewed, and the interviewer asks him/her the secret of their success, almost inevitably the first thing that person says is, “I love what I do and I have a passion for it.”  If you love it for its own sake, your primary reason for doing it isn’t to win a trophy.   When you love it you naturally want to master it, to learn it, and success will often follow.  I believe that those people who love what they do will naturally have a “growth mindset,” since they will naturally want to spend time “working” (more like playing) at it.     

I suspect that a large part of what is going on here is the reason children are saying, “You’ve got it or you don’t.” is that this is a way to try to avoid doing things they simply don’t like to do.  Instead of saying, “Dad I hate this, it’s boring, and don’t want to do it.” it might be a better strategy for a child to say, “Dad I’m just no good at it, and I can’t do any better.”  While it is no doubt the case that children often do convince themselves that they really can’t get any better with effort, I think this is often simply a rationalization.  If I’m correct the underlying source of the problem here isn’t ultimately one of a mistake in self understanding as Dweck believes, but one of requiring children to do things they don’t like doing.  This guess could be tested by looking at the correlation between the degree of dislike for a topic, and the probability a child will profess a belief in fixed performance (while controlling for ability and other possible confounding factors).  Also, if for most children the professed belief in fixed abilities isn’t general across topics, but only applied to particular disliked topics; this would provide support for my suspicions.    

I’m also pretty sure Dweck is also mistaken in her understanding of what is changing when a child improves.  From a university class I had in intelligence testing I learned that, past early childhood, intelligence isn’t “like a muscle”, and doesn’t change.  Your talents and abilities are in fact fixed.  While you can perform better with effort, what is changing is your performance, not your underlying abilities.  In short Dweck is proposing another version of the 1968 Pygmalion Study which found that teacher expectations had enormous impact on student’s subsequent performance.  The problem is that this study had numerous methodological deficiencies, and most importantly couldn’t be replicated.  I suspect that Dweck is being similarly overly optimistic about the possibilities of improving student performance with her research findings.      

Having said this, given that children will unfortunately be forced to do things they don’t like, I agree that teaching them study skills is beneficial.  This is not for the reasons Dweck gives, but because this gives children more tools for gaining leverage when approaching a topic, (which also might make it more of a creative experience, and therefore less of a distasteful one), removes an excuse they have been using, and provides practice at learning to discipline themselves to put up with unpleasant tasks.  

Of course, this entire situation is the unfortunate result of the mismatch between what people were originally designed to enjoy, and what we now have to do to function in the world as it currently is.

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