Dean Burnett

These two traits, impostor syndrome in intelligent people and illogical self-confidence in less intelligent people, regularly overlap in unhelpful ways.

Louis Leon Thurstone in 1938, who proposed that human intelligence was made up of seven Primary Mental Abilities:

If you get really good at something then your brain becomes so efficient at it, it essentially stops realising it’s happening. And if it doesn’t know it’s happening, it won’t adapt or respond to it, so you get a self-limiting effect.

Genetics, parenting styles, quality of education, cultural norms, stereotyping, general health, personal interests, disorders; all of these and more can lead to the brain being more or less able or likely to perform intelligent actions. You can no more separate human intelligence from human culture than you could separate a fish’s development from the water it lives in. Even if you were to separate a fish from the water, its development would only ever be ‘brief’.

But being treated as if they were smarter and brighter meant they essentially started performing to meet expectations.

but you could argue that it’s an inevitability when you make endless amounts of food available to a species that has evolved to take whatever food it can get whenever it can get it.

Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas were identified because damage to them caused aphasias, which are profound disruptions to speech and understanding. Broca’s aphasia, aka expressive aphasia, means someone cannot ‘produce’ language. There’s nothing wrong with their mouth or tongue, they can still understand speech, they just can’t produce any fluid, coherent communication of their own. They may be able to utter a few relevant words, but long complex sentences are practically impossible.

Some argue that language is even more neurologically important. The theory of linguistic relativity claims that the language a person speaks underlies their cognitive processing and ability to perceive the world.

Some go further, claiming that changing the language someone uses can change how they think.

Facial expressions also aid social interactions; if we’re doing something and everyone has a happy expression, we know we should keep doing it to gain approval. If everyone looks at us and appears shocked, angry, disgusted or all three, then we should stop what we’re doing rather quickly. This feedback helps guide our own behaviours.