JOHN DUNCAN is assistant director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, honorary professor of cognitive neuroscience at the universities of Cambridge and Bangor, visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy. He is known for his frontal-lobe theory of human intelligence, which has been covered in the media worldwide – including the BBC, ABC News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Science and New Scientist. HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS, his first book for a popular audience, is based on his 30-year research programme linking human mind to brain. He lives in a small village close to Cambridge.

HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS
JOHN DUNCAN

From a scientist at the forefront of revolutionary work in neuroscience, a firsthand account of his search for the biological basis of intelligence.

 

Human intelligence is among the most powerful forces on Earth. It builds spreading cities, enormous cornfields and coffee plantations, microchips; it takes us from the atom to the limits of the Universe. Understanding how brains build intelligence is among the most fascinating challenges of modern science. How does the biological brain, a collection of billions of cells, enable us to do things no other species can do? In this book John Duncan, a scientist who has spent 30 years studying the human brain, offers an adventure story – the story of the hunt for basic principles of human intelligence, behaviour and thought.

Using results drawn from classical studies of intelligence testing, from attempts to build computers that think, from studies of how minds change after brain damage, from modern discoveries of brain imaging and from groundbreaking recent research, Duncan synthesizes often difficult-to-understand information into a book that will appeal to scientific and popular readers alike. He explains how brains break down problems into useful, solvable parts, then assemble these parts into the complex mental programmes of human though and action.

At the heart of the book is the quest for the seat of intelligence: the cerebral source of general intelligence that many have been tempted to call the g spot. The author and his colleagues have identified one brain region, rather than many, that seems to be at the core of IQ: a zone in the frontal lobes, just above the outer edges of the eyebrows. The region is important for planning and solving novel tasks, keeping many things in mind at once and screening out irrelevant information – and is revealing itself as a hitherto unknown window into human nature.

Moving from the foundations of psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience to the most current scientific thinking, HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS is for all those curious to understand what we actually mean by intelligence, how and why it happens and what this can tell us about ourselves – in other words, how their own minds work.

Publisher: Yale University Press (UK/US)
Pub date: 26 October 2010
Status: Finished manuscript
Length: 70,000 words

All rights available excluding:
World English Language (Yale University Press)