Dear friends,

I very much dissagree with some of the points raised in the video and the ideas exposed by Prof. Haier.

First of all, there is no manner currently to “read” the mind of a person, and scientists should restrain from propagating these sort of science-fiction chattering to the society. All that our high-tech brain imaging devices are capable of is to show us where “activity” is happening in the brain at certain time. As a technical problem, I would stress that neuroimaging software shows where this activity happens more than it is expected, but how to define and characterise that expectation is deep issue. Conceptually speaking, the fact that we observe activity doesn’t tell us “what” is the brain doing because we have no idea of which are the real processes of information that are happening in the brain behind that observed “activation”. And we know even less how those unkonwn processes translate into the language of the mind.

When Prof. Haier shows the MEG movie of the brain activity, he can describe the process of activation only because he already knows what the task is! Show the same movie to any neuroscientist without giving them any further information and ask them “what was the subject THINKING while this brain activity was recorded?” and there is no scientist on earth who can tell you: “the person was sitting in front a computer screen, he/she saw a flash of light on the right/left of the computer screen and consequently pressed a button of the computer to signalise the stimulus was at the left or at the right.” At most, from that pattern of activity one could distinguish that there was some visual stimulation in the beginning and there was some sort of motor activity at the end. So any neuroscientist will just guess that the subject was doing yet another of the typical, extremely simple experiments every cognitive neuroscience lab in the world do. And this, is light-years away from uncovering what a person is thinking of.

Moreover, as well explained in the video, the brain works “more” when a problem is difficult or new, and it makes less effort when the task becomes pseudo-authomatic. As intelligent behaviour produces less activity, we are more likely to observe by neuroimaging thecniques those processes which are harder for the brain to perform, while those arising from intelligent behaviour (the easy ones) could even remain hidden to our activity-detecting machines.

The second point I want to rise is that, saying that the grey matter is like the processor and the role of the white matter in intelligence is just to speed up the propagation of signals is not only simplistic, it is wrong. The white matter (which occupies more than 80% of the cortical volume) are the paths of communication between the cortical regions. These “roads” form a complex network of communication between cortical regions which specifies which cortical regions communicate with which. So, very likely (and now I am speculating) intelligence has little to do with the “processing capacities” of the neuron bodies (which are located in the grey matter) and with the speed of the electrical signals, but very much related to the manner in which neurons and cortical regions are connected with each other. Because some patterns of connections (either local or long range) might facilitate the formation of associations and hence, determine the manner in which the brain coordinates the information to solve problems. Whatever these problems are cognitive, emotional and/or mechanical.

My best wishes, and I would like to motivate the team of “Redes” (networks in spanish) to prepare some programs on the emerging science of complex networks and brain connectivity.