Generic discussion of brain imaging, chess masters, London taxi drivers, and grade inflation

32 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? it's software that matters. A great computer game is great because it is cleverly written and has beautiful graphics. The speed of the hardware might help, but it does not define ‘great’ Can we see these software effects in the brain? No, unfortunately, this is where our imaging technologies fail. They lack sufficient resolution. We would need 100,000 times more resolution to see our thoughts, even assuming we would recognize thought if we saw it. There is no reason to believe the brain lays out thinking in anything resembling the computer software we are accustomed to reading. There is one exceptional group of people that does show a software difference on a large-scale — chess players. It seems Chess Masters use a different part of their brain to process information about chess than you and I. This can be clearly seen on scans of the brain and is such a gross effect it even shows up in old-fashioned EEGs - where electrodes are taped to your head. Interestingly the effect can be used to predict greatness. Players likely to become Grand Masters show they use a different part of their brain from the rest of us at an early age. Chess players possess the only large scale wiring difference we know of, but there is another group with a visible physical difference, London taxi drivers. Their hippocampi are noticeably larger than the rest of ours. The hippocampus does many things, but one of its most significant jobs is to memorize maps. The three years it takes to acquire ‘the knowledge’ and the subsequent years of navigating London's complex streets give cabbies a 30% larger hippocampus than the average London resident. Is Intelligence Static? We've all seen the headline. Every summer public examination results come out and every year is pronounced a record breaker! Year after year, students get better and better grades. This creates a problem. There's is no better grade than an A — and eventually all students get As. Welcome to grade inflation — a problem affecting systems the world over, from British ‘A levels to Harvard grade point averages. Newspapers are awash with stories bemoaning the dumbing down of today’s tests. “Examinations aren't what they used to be.” Grade inflation undoubtedly exists and studies of undergraduate grades show progressive compression into the top grades, most competent students get ‘As, making it difficult to distinguish a good student from a great one. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015722