The five intelligences of the human being

The evolutionary keys to understanding our cognition.

If someone says something along the lines of "You are an animal!", we should not feel offended. We should feel comforted that they have perceived our vital energy and capacity and that they have realized that we belong neither to the vegetable nor to the mineral kingdom, the other two alternatives that Mother Nature offers us.

It would be another thing if she were to qualify us as "bad animal" or "vermin", but belonging to the animal kingdom in the warm-blooded subkingdom is clearly a reason for satisfaction, a good fortune to be celebrated.

If, on the other hand, they call us "gorilla" or "orangutan", they are telling us that we have insufficient mental development; but if they call us "primate" they are correctly positioning us in the subspecies to which we belong.

Relative rationality

In my adolescence, teachers used to tell us that man was the only rational animal endowed with a soul. soulmade in the likeness of God. Science has called into question this belief of clear religious origin, since there are many animals that show a similar level of rationality.

On the other hand, the rational capacity of humans does not by any means guarantee that our behavior is always rational.. And the explanation is very simple: we are not only rational. Our brain has been configured by evolution in five stages of functioning, inherited from our ancestors. Neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have shown that we possess instinctive capacities (like primitive reptiles), emotional memory capacities (like the first mammals in evolution), rapid intuitive response capacities (like the great primates), rational capacities (inherited from the hominids that preceded us) and vision and planning capacities, the true distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens.

The brain is built by evolutionary stages

Each stage of Darwinian evolution has left its anatomical evidence in a new growth area of the brain.. Moreover, the human brain is the part of the human body that has grown most dramatically with evolution. As paleontologist Phillip V. Tobias wrote in 1995: "Man, in just a time span of 2 to 3 million years, has increased the weight of the brain from 500 grams to 1,400 grams. An increase of almost a kilo of brain".

To the purely instinctive brain of reptiles, primitive mammals added the limbic system that allows them to retain memory of the emotions of pleasure or pain associated with their previous behaviors and, consequently, gives them the ability to rectify or ratify the instinctive reaction, This gives them the capacity to rectify or ratify the instinctive reaction, i.e., the control of the instinctive reactions.The primate cortex, that is to say: the control of instincts, the ability to learn based on rewards and punishments. Primates acquired an added cerebral cortex that provides them with the capacity to relate in milliseconds their previous experiences with the current experience and to intuit whether it is convenient to reject or accept the food, the object or the company that is being offered to them.

According to paleontologists, the disappeared hominids developed the polarization of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex that allowed them to apply logic and deductive reasoning to the problems of their existence, with a response time tremendously inferior to the preceding intuition, but with a marvelous and amazing capacity to build tools and progress in the way of life. Language, art, culture and science are born thanks to this evolution of the neocortex.

The last stage of evolution has been the growth of the neocortex of homo sapiens until it overflows the cranial capacity and spreads over the forehead above the eyes and nose, the so-called prefrontal lobes. Therein lies our new, more evolved and superior capacity: the vision of the future, the ability to imagine before making a decision what the consequences of that decision might be, the ability to think long term and follow principles and rules, and so on.

The executive brain

The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg, a disciple of the great neuroscientist Alexander Luria, calls the executive brain the executive brain the prefrontal lobes because they have the function and capacity to supervise and control the rest of the brain areas upstream in evolution. It is like an orchestra conductor who, with his baton, directs the different musicians playing together. But if we take the orchestra metaphor, we will have to recognize that, all too often, the music comes out out of tune or out of order.

The explanation is simple: each musician is a vedette impatient and tends to anticipate the conductor's baton.. In more scientific words: the order of arrival of external or internal stimuli to the various brain areas follows the same order of their appearance on the evolutionary scale and, consequently, each brain function receives the information when the previous areas have already begun to respond. It can only slow down the initiated reaction or accelerate it, but for a few tenths of a second its own notes have already sounded, whether or not they suit the overall harmony.

Five intelligences for adapting to the environment

If we call "intelligence" the ability to adapt to the stimuli of the existing environment in order to react in a way that offers the maximum benefit or minimizes damage (depending on the situation), we can affirm that the human brain is endowed with five intelligences, of ever-increasing complexity and scope.of ever-increasing complexity and scope, following the evolutionary progression.

Instinctive intelligence is given to us by chromosomal inheritance. It allows us individual survival in the face of genetically internalized dangers and collective survival at the level of the species. If a bee wants to sting us with its stinger, our instinct makes us avoid it and try to eliminate it with a swipe. This is a very beneficial reaction on the street, but it can cause death by accident if we are driving a vehicle on a highway at high speed.

Emotional intelligence: a new paradigm

The so-called emotional intelligence incorporates rationality and foresight into the control of emotions that, without this filter, can cause us to fall into highly damaging visceral reactions. The insult or aggression that escapes us, not to mention the unfortunate crime of passion.

Intuitive intelligence allows us to make immediate decisions when there is no time to think rationally.. It is based on the accumulation of previous experiences, it is the result of acquired experience. An automatic and quick contrast with the lived experiences gives us a clear reaction of acceptance or repulsion of the situation, object or person that is offered to us. It is not infallible because our statistic of lived events is never infinite, but it should be a very serious warning to take into account. Often, the evaluation made later by rational intelligence makes us act wrongly against the intuitive warning. It is up to each person to better calibrate his or her intuition and decide when to listen to it and when not to.

Rational intelligence (also called analytical, logical, deductive or equivalent adjectives), which works in complete contrast to intuition, requires time and calmness.. It has been the one that has allowed the creation of all that we call civilization and human progress, the one that has saved nature's pitfalls, the one that has given us tools to overcome our obvious Biological inferiority compared to other animals. It is also the one that sometimes has been put at the service of human evil, enhancing to chilling extremes the capacity to exploit and even take the lives of other people, animals, wildlife, the climate, the entire planet. The one that can cause real disasters when it lacks foresight for the future. The human species has admired this type of intelligence so much that for more than a century it has mistakenly believed that it was the only intelligence we possessed, the only one worth possessing. The famous IQ (intelligence quotient) was based on this idea.

Planning intelligence, the mastery of the executive brain, is the great current pending issue in psychology and, of course, in education at all levels. and, of course, of teaching at all levels. Knowing how to coordinate all the musicians in the same symphony so that there are no discordant notes is the clear mission of orchestra conductors.

In conclusion

Applying any of the five intelligences individually is not good or bad in itself. A musician can play a fantastic "solo" or go out of tune to the point of breaking our ears. But the clear objective of any orchestra is to play magnificent orchestral pieces in perfect harmony and coordination. It is necessary to learn to play following the conductor's baton.

Perhaps we should say that evolution has endowed us with an intelligence composed of five dimensions to harmonize. In any case, it is a matter of achieving an effective intelligence that combines instincts, emotions, intuition, reasoning and planning capacity in the most appropriate way for our individual and social well-being.