ANATOMY OF INTELLIGENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1939, Page 4

ANATOMY OF INTELLIGENCE

WOMEN THINK FASTER THAN MEN. A somewhat disconcerting discovery, so far as men are concerned, is that women think faster than men, says Dr Edward Podolsky, writing in the Quarterly Review of the anatomy of intelligence. The principal criteria in judging the functional activity of the brain by means of its electrical effects are: (1) the frequency; (2) amplitude; and (3) the rhythm of the brain waves which appear on the film strip. In women Dr Donald Lindsley, the brain specialist, found the average frequency of the alpha waves was 11 per second, in men, 10.2 per second. Hence the deduction that women think faster. An other interesting thing about brain waves is that they are individual for each person, almost as individual as fingerprints. It has been suggested that in the future brain waves of criminals may be made to be kept on file as are fingerprints at the present time. This interesting possibility has been worked out by Professor Lee Edward Travis at lowa State University. He made a series of brain wave tracings of forty-four healthy students. Each student had brain waves of very marked individuality as far as frequency; form and' amplitude of the waves are concerned. Successive pictures of the contour of the brain always matched each individual student. It shows that each individual has his own technique of thinking. Brain students are now getting a clear picture of what constitutes intelligence, Dr Podolsky concludes. Certain are they that intelligence depends not upon the size or weight of the brain, as hithertofore believed, but upon the amount of blood furnished the brain, the quality of the blood as influenced by internal and external chemical changes, which may also have something to do with the electrical energy of the brain.