Less is more? A strange case of improvement in intelligence & personality after removal of prefrontal cortical tissue!

While reading a paper on the neuroscience of dreaming I came across a reference to a 1940 paper by Donald Hebb and Wilder Penfield. It’s a neurosurgery case study that is quite stunning. It shows that in some cases, removal of prefrontal brain tissue can actually cause improvements in intelligence and personality. So basically it’s the opposite of the Phineas Gage story.

Here are some excerpts from the paper:

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“The first rule of intelligence: Don’t talk about your intelligence”

That line is from an article in The Atlantic about how poor people are at self-assessment:

People Don’t Actually Know Themselves Very Well

“The first rule of intelligence: Don’t talk about your intelligence. It’s something you prove, not something you claim. As comedian Patton Oswalt quipped about humor, the only person who goes around saying “I’m funny” is a not-funny person. If you were really funny, you’d just make people laugh.”

To me this kind of thing is pretty obvious, but I guess some people really need to be reminded of it.

Here’s another paragraph with several important reminders, particularly for people who blather about intelligence and cognitive biases:

“This is why people consistently overestimate their intelligence, a pattern that seems to be more pronounced among men than women. It’s also why people overestimate their generosity: It’s a desirable trait. And it’s why people fall victim to my new favorite bias: the I’m-not-biased bias, where people tend to believethey have fewer biases than the average American. But you can’t judge whether you’re biased, because when it comes to yourself, you’re the most biased judge of all. And the more objective people think they are, the more they discriminate, because they don’t realize how vulnerable they are to bias.”