Intelligence

Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘intelligence’ is far from a settled quantity: it is contested terrain where neuroscience, philosophy of mind, yogic metaphysics, and archetypal psychology converge and contend. McGilchrist mounts the most sustained neuropsychological argument, demonstrating through lesion studies and longitudinal IQ data that fluid intelligence — the capacity for novel problem-solving — is primarily a right-hemisphere function, and that modernity’s left-hemisphere bias is producing a measurable, generational decline in high-end cognitive capacity. Von Franz introduces a typological corrective: the Jungian schema of psychological functions demands we speak not of a single IQ but of multiple intelligences — the thinking mind, the intelligence of the heart, the intelligence of intuition — each capable of its own form of excellence or deficiency. Aurobindo situates ordinary mental intelligence within a hierarchy of consciousness that ascends through buddhi toward supramental gnosis, treating discursive reason as a useful but ultimately limited instrument. The Philokalia distinguishes between intelligence confined to rational intellections and a higher participatory knowing that supersedes it entirely. Craig’s interoceptive neuroscience identifies the anterior insular cortex as the key computational resource for fluid intelligence, linking cognition inseparably to bodily feeling and homeostatic integration. Hillman, characteristically, unsettles the genetic framing by proposing that native intelligence in early life and late adulthood reflects the soul’s own code more than hereditary endowment. The corpus thus holds intelligence simultaneously as neural substrate, functional type, spiritual faculty, and evolutionary indicator.

In the library 21 passages

Gf, they found, was associated with a broadly distributed network of brain regions primarily within the right hemisphere … This pattern of findings suggests that Gf reflects the ability to effectively integrate verbal, spatial, motor, and executive processes via a circumscribed set of cortical connections in the right hemisphere.

Lesion-study evidence demonstrates that fluid intelligence — the gold-standard measure of general cognitive capacity — is primarily a right-hemisphere function dependent on long white-matter integration tracts.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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in factor analytic studies, the best tests of g involve fluid intelligence or novel problem solving … Long white matter tracts in the right hemisphere were found to be particularly significant … which confirms previous research demonstrating their importance for general intelligence.

General intelligence as measured by factor-analytic g converges on right-hemisphere architecture, especially long-range white-matter connectivity essential to novel problem-solving.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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Norwegian research on within-family changes in IQ over time shows a decline in intelligence scores of about seven points per generation … the large changes in average intelligence must be to a considerable extent due to environmental factors in the society in which children are growing up.

Within-family longitudinal data establish an environmentally driven generational decline in measured intelligence, implicating modern cultural and educational conditions rather than genetic drift alone.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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the overall trend is downward, as we now see in most highly industrialised Western countries … only the effects of overall decline in intelligence, at least as things stand today.

McGilchrist reads the reversal of the Flynn effect as evidence that industrialised environments are systematically suppressing the right-hemisphere capacities on which high-level intelligence depends.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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The French have an expression which speaks of the intelligence du coeur — the intelligence of the heart. There are people who cannot think but who have a tremendous intelligence of the heart … That is why we prefer to speak of the differentiation of functions, rather than of the I. Q. of a person.

Von Franz replaces the unitary IQ model with a typological account in which each psychological function — feeling, intuition, sensation — possesses its own form of intelligence irreducible to abstract reasoning.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993thesis

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the most important fact is that, based on the efforts of two independent groups, we have evidence now that soundly confirms the prediction that the AIC is crucial for fluid intelligence.

Independent neuroimaging studies converge on the anterior insula’s centrality to fluid intelligence, corroborating a model in which interoceptive integration and cognitive performance are inseparable.

Craig, A.D. Bud, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting

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the decimation of top scores may be accompanied by gains in cognitive ability below the median … Piagetian tests may be more sensitive to detecting this phenomenon.

Piagetian assessments sensitive to formal operational reasoning reveal that environmental factors are disproportionately targeting the highest tier of intelligence, producing a hollowing of exceptional cognitive capacity.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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in late adulthood, when calling, character, and fate have become more inescapable, then, too, one’s intelligence, and all that it serves, belongs more to the code of the soul than to that of the genes.

Hillman argues that at life’s extremes — earliest infancy and late adulthood — measured intelligence reflects the soul’s innate daimon more faithfully than hereditary or environmental factors.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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Buddhi is a construction of conscious being which quite exceeds its beginnings in the basic chitta; it is the intelligence with its power of knowledge and will. Buddhi takes up and deals with all the rest of the action of the mind and life and body.

Aurobindo positions buddhi — the spiritual intelligence — as a faculty that transcends mere sense-processing mentality, constituting the pivot between ordinary mind and supramental consciousness.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting

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In human mind there is the first appearance of an observing intelligence that regards what is being done and of a will and choice that have become conscious; but the consciousness is still limited and superficial.

Aurobindo traces the evolutionary emergence of intelligence as an observing faculty that first appears in the human mind, partial and groping, destined for transformation into a more luminous supramental cognition.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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The intelligence recognizes two kinds of knowledge of divine realities. The first is relative, because it is confined to the intelligence and its intellections … The second is true and authentic knowledge. Through experience alone and through grace it brings about … a total and active perception of what is known.

The Philokalia distinguishes the intelligence’s discursive, relative knowledge from a participatory experiential knowing that supersedes the intellect entirely, pointing toward theosis.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting

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Ego is the specific aspect of ignorance that identifies the nonself, specifically the intelligence, with the true self, puruṣa … ‘Not perceiving the puruṣa self to be distinct from the buddhi intelligence in form, nature, and awareness, one makes the mistake of considering the intelligence to be the true ātman self as a result of illusion.’

Yoga philosophy treats the misidentification of buddhi-intelligence with the true self as the foundational error generating suffering, establishing intelligence as an evolved instrument of prakṛti rather than the witnessing consciousness itself.

Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting

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This may be … that we have started to see the world through what Flynn calls ‘scientific spectacles’: The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people.

McGilchrist entertains Flynn’s hypothesis that rising IQ scores reflected not genuine cognitive enhancement but a cultural shift toward abstract, decontextualised reasoning — a shift now potentially reversing.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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The human mind would here be called upon to make a still greater change and … can only be undertaken securely when the mind has become aware of the greater self within … the faculty of intuition, a power of which we can feel the presence and the workings … something supramental in its nature or at least in its origin.

Aurobindo presents intuition as the highest expression of intelligence available to the human mind, a supramental faculty mediating the transition from discursive reason to gnosis.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting

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it is this contact which is the cause first of a conscious sensation and sense-perception and then of intelligence … it is because the contact stimulates into a feeling and a surface response the subliminal of a being already vitalised by the subconscious life-principle.

Aurobindo derives intelligence genetically from the intersection of conscious contact and subliminal life-force, situating it within an evolutionary ontology of ascending consciousness.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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Nothing in the intelligence can be contrary to the intelligence … he who has come to apprehend the principle of virtue will clearly have no way of knowing the state that is contrary to the intelligence.

Maximos the Confessor identifies true intelligence with virtue’s principle, such that the perfected intellect cannot contain its own negation — intelligence, rightly ordered, is self-consistent and self-luminous.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting

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Talent hits a target no-one else can hit, wrote Schopenhauer; genius hits a target no-one else can see … what you needed was someone who studied species, read Malthus, and had the ability to make a cross-connection. That is the crucial point, that is the rare characteristic that must be found.

McGilchrist locates the highest expression of intelligence in cross-modal analogical thinking — pattern recognition across disparate domains — a capacity he associates specifically with right-hemisphere function.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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whether creativity is preponderantly genetic or environmental. In place of the eternal enigma of human creativity, this ‘gray’ explanation offers less risk … the ‘calling’ proposed by the acorn theory … offers less satisfaction to the imaginative mind.

Hillman critiques nature-nurture framings of creativity and by extension intelligence, proposing the acorn theory’s daimon as a third explanatory principle irreducible to either genetics or environment.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside

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Gestalt perception, on the other hand, when based on a sufficient wealth of unbiased observation, has a way of being right, and if one is familiar with its occasional trick of being altogether wrong and knows when to discount its assertions, it is an invaluable and quite indispensable guide.

McGilchrist frames Gestalt perception — the holistic, pattern-sensitive mode of knowing — as a form of intelligence distinct from and superior to rule-governed hypothetico-deductive reasoning.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside

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