A few days ago I was reading a fascinating essay by David Bessis that made me think deeply about something we all take for granted: intelligence. Bessis, a mathematician and author of Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity, presents a thesis that challenges many of our deeply held beliefs about the origin of cognitive differences between people.
What’s most interesting about his approach is not so much the conclusion -which I’ll get to- but the path he traces to get there, a path that mixes mathematics, neuroscience, and a good dose of personal experience.
The mystery of cognitive inequality
We’ve all experienced that feeling: there are people who simply seem to “think faster” or understand complex things with an ease that seems almost magical to us. In the world of academic mathematics, where Bessis developed his career, this inequality is especially evident and brutal.
The question we’ve all asked ourselves is the same: what’s going on in the brains of those extraordinarily intelligent people that isn’t going on in ours?
Conventional answers tend to fall into one of two extremes: either it’s genetic (they were born with better “hardware”) or it’s social/environmental (better education, more resources). But Bessis argues that both explanations are insufficient.
The wrong metaphors
One of the things that made me think most about the essay is how it critiques the metaphors we use to understand the brain. We tend to think of it as a computer with a more or less fast processor, with more or less RAM memory. Bessis explains why this analogy is fundamentally wrong from a biochemical perspective.
From a genetic point of view, differences between humans are minute variations in the same proteins, which maintain the same structures and functions. It’s not that some people have a Snapdragon 8 and others have an NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPU. It’s more like some have a Snapdragon 7 and others have a Snapdragon 8: the difference is noticeable, but everyone runs the same apps.
And yet, the cognitive gap we observe in mathematics -Bessis says- is so absurd that “it’s as if some people could run the 100-meter dash in under a second, while most wouldn’t make it in a week.” Genetic differences simply cannot explain inequality of that magnitude.
What Einstein really said
This is where the essay gets really interesting. Bessis compiles a series of quotes from figures like Einstein, Newton, Feynman, and Grothendieck that all say more or less the same thing:
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein
“But if I have done the public any service this way it is due to nothing but industry & a patient thought.” — Isaac Newton
“I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people.” — Richard Feynman
I confess that when I was a teenager and read these statements, they seemed absurdly hypocritical to me. What was Einstein, of all people, telling me that he had no special talent? It’s like listening to a supermodel giving us lessons on the importance of inner beauty.
But Bessis argues that these statements were not hypocrisy, but an honest attempt to communicate something for which we simply don’t have good vocabulary.
The six conjectures
The heart of the essay is a series of six “conjectures” -unproven but coherent hypotheses- that Bessis proposes as an alternative to conventional genetic explanations:
Conjecture 1: Genetic differences in brain tissue structure, volume, speed, and efficiency cannot alone explain the magnitude of observed cognitive inequality.
Conjecture 2: Cognitive differences between individuals are primarily explained by differences in their synaptic connectomes -the specific network of neural interconnections.
Conjecture 3: People have vastly different mental habits and metacognitive approaches.
Conjecture 4: Most of these differences in mental habits are acquired (not necessarily through deliberate education, but as developmental outcomes).
Conjecture 5: These differences in mental habits accumulate over time, producing measurable differences in cognitive ability.
Conjecture 6: Cognitive inhibition -that visceral fear we feel before intellectual difficulty- is an adaptive protective mechanism against learning from unreliable mental imagery.
The mathematical connection
What really resonates with me about this essay is how it describes the experience of “doing mathematics.” Bessis explains that when he sees a Raven matrix (one of the most common IQ tests), he doesn’t have to “think” much. His brain has developed an eidetic perception of mathematical structures -permutations, in this case- that allows him to perceive patterns that for other people require enormous conscious effort.
But he clarifies something important: this ability was not innate. He only learned about permutations at eighteen, and continued to develop his intuition over decades.
The importance of secondary stimuli
Here, for me, is the most powerful idea in the essay: our brains learn not only from the primary stimuli we receive from the outside world, but also from secondary stimuli -the continuous flow of mental images we constantly elaborate.
When we dream, imagine things, experience that strange phenomenon we call “stream of consciousness,” we are retraining our brains with our own synthetic stimuli. This seems metabolically expensive and risky -why did we evolve to do it?
Bessis’s answer is that these secondary stimuli are crucial for advanced cognitive development. And here’s the key: some people have discovered exceptionally effective ways to generate high-quality secondary stimuli, while others haven’t.
The 20% full glass
All this can sound depressing. If cognitive differences crystallize early in development, and if both the genetic and socioeconomic lotteries play an important role… what can we do?
Bessis offers a perspective I find useful: intelligence, like wealth, is the continuing outcome of a non-deterministic capitalization process. The 80% empty glass is that life is unfair and we cannot replay the past. There are no miracle people, but there are miracle trajectories.
But the 20% full glass is that the one thing that is truly ours -our attention, the focus of our curiosity, how we navigate our stream of consciousness- may matter much more than we ever dreamed.
Final reflection
What I like about this essay is that it doesn’t promise false hopes or offer magic recipes. It recognizes that cognitive inequalities are real and that there are factors we cannot control. But at the same time, it reminds us that we have more agency than we think.
Our attention -how we focus it, what we practice with it, what secondary stimuli we generate- is perhaps the most valuable resource we have. And that, in a world full of distractions, is something worth remembering.
This article is based on the essay “Attention is all we have” by David Bessis, published in his Substack newsletter. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend reading the original essay, which delves much deeper into each of these points.
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