How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now
by William H. Calvin.

What is intelligence and what's it good for? If you prove to be good at choosing one answer to specific types of multiple-choice questions, you're called "smart" and said to have a "high Intelligence Quotient." But according to William H. Calvin, real intelligence is what you bring to play when you stand in front of the refrigerator contemplating the leftovers of the past weeks and figuring out what you could do with them. As Jean Piaget used to exclaim, intelligence is what you do when you don't already know what to do.

When the standard answers and learned behaviors don't suffice then you have to reach for special creativity and that's when real intelligence can appear. This is because evolving new behaviors "on the fly" requires a great deal of innovative trial and error in the brain in imitation of life, and normally in the last seconds before actual action is to be performed. But how do you make something real and of quality out of the disjointed brain patters of dreams and thoughts?

This book explores how our inner life develops from one moment to the next, as we move from one topic to the next - sometimes with purpose but sometimes with apparent randomness. As we create and reject varying alternatives, there isn't actually a little person in our head making all the decisions, although it surely feels that way sometimes. Darwin, however, showed us how even elaborate and complex things can emerge on their own from much simpler origins.

Darwinian self-organization thus forms the basis of Calvin's proposed explanation for how consciousness and intelligence emerge from neurons and hormones. The bootstrapping of new ideas functions much like our immune response system or even the evolution of new species. The primary difference, fortunately for us, is that our brain goes about it a whole lot faster than anything else. If our brains only worked as fast as even our immune sytem, it would take days if not weeks to make even simple decisions.

As a theoretical neruophysiologist Calvin draws upon anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics and of course the neurosciences. In addition to how current decisions are made, the book examines how an intelligent brain could have evolved in the first place. Slow biological improvements over the last few million years have created a great deal of versatility and plasticity. Encouraged by abrupt climate changes, it now uses a nonbiogical track: the building of intelligent machines. Of course, that won't go very far until we better undertand our own biological intelligence - and Calvin's book should go a long way towards that.