If someone drops a phrase like “you’re an animal!”, we shouldn’t be offended. D e should feel comforted that they have perceived our energy and vital capacity and that they have realized that we belong neither to the vegetable nor the mineral kingdom, the two other alternatives that Mother Nature offers us.

It would be another thing to be labeled a “bad animal” or “vermin”, but belonging to the animal kingdom in the warm-blooded sub-realm is clearly a cause for satisfaction, a cause for celebration.

If, on the other hand, they call us “gorilla” or “orangutan”, they are telling us that we have insufficient mental development; but if they call us “primate” they are positioning us correctly in the subspecies to which we belong.

A relative rationality

In my adolescence, teachers told us that man was the only rational animal endowed with soul , made in the likeness of God. Science has questioned this belief of clear religious origin, since many animals show a similar level of rationality.

On the other hand, the rational capacity of humans does not guarantee, by far, that our behavior is always rational . And the explanation is very simple: we are not only rational. Our brain has been configured by evolution in five stages of functioning, inherited from our ancestors. Neurosciences and Evolutionary Psychology have shown that we possess instinctive capacities (like the primitive reptiles), emotional memory capacities (like the first mammals in evolution), capacities for quick responses through intuition (like the great primates), rational capacities (inherited from the hominids that preceded us) and capacities for vision of the future and planning, the true differential characteristic of Homo sapiens.

The brain is built by evolutionary phases

Each stage of Darwinian evolution has left its anatomical record in a new growth zone of the brain . Furthermore, the human brain is the part of the human body that has grown most dramatically with evolution. As the paleontologist Phillip V. Tobias wrote in 1995: “Man, in just a space of time of 2 to 3 million years, has increased the weight of the brain from 500 grams to 1,400 grams. An increase of almost one kilogram of brain”.

To the merely instinctive brain of the reptiles, the primitive mammals added the limbic system that allows them to preserve memory of the emotions of pleasure or pain associated to their previous behaviors and, consequently, gives them the capacity to rectify or ratify the instinctive reaction , that is: the control of the instincts, the capacity of learning by means of prizes and punishments. Primates acquired an added cerebral cortex that provides them with the capacity to relate their previous experiences with the current experience in thousandths of seconds and to intuit whether it is convenient for them to reject or accept the food, the object or the company that is being offered to them.

According to the paleontologists, the disappeared hominids developed the polarization of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex that allowed them to apply logic and deductive reasoning to the problems of their existence, with a response time tremendously inferior to the previous intuition, but with a wonderful and amazing capacity to build tools and progress in the way of life. Language, art, culture and science are born thanks to this evolution of the neocortex.

The last stage of evolution has been the growth of the neocortex of Homo sapiens until it exceeds the cranial capacity and spreads over the forehead above the eyes and nose, the so-called prefrontal lobes. Therein lies our new, more evolved and superior capacity: vision of the future, the ability to imagine before making a decision what the consequences of that decision may be, the ability to think long-term and follow principles and rules, etc.

The Executive Brain

Neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg, a disciple of the great neurologist Alexander Luria, calls the prefrontal lobes the executive brain because they have the function and capacity to supervise and control the rest of the brain areas prior to evolution. It is like an orchestra conductor who, with his baton, directs the different musicians who play together. But if we use the metaphor of the orchestra, we have to recognize that, too often, the music is out of tune or out of sync.

The explanation is simple: each musician is an impatient vedette who has a tendency to anticipate the conductor’s baton . In more scientific words: the order of arrival of external or internal stimuli to the different brain areas follows the same order of their appearance in the evolutionary scale and, consequently, each brain function receives the information when the previous areas have already started to respond. It can only slow down the initiated reaction or accelerate it, but during a few tenths of a second its own notes have already sounded, whether they are convenient to the global harmony or not.

Five intelligences to adapt to the environment

If we call “intelligence” the ability to adapt to the stimuli of the existing environment in order to react in a way that offers maximum benefit or minimizes the damage (depending on the situation), we can affirm that the human brain is endowed with five intelligences , of increasing complexity and scope, following the evolutionary progression.

Instinctive intelligence is given to us by chromosomal inheritance. It allows us individual survival in the face of dangers already genetically internalized and collective survival at the level of the species. If a bee wants to stick its sting in us, our instinct makes us avoid it and try to eliminate it in one fell swoop. This is a very beneficial reaction at street level, but it can cause us to die by accident if we are driving a vehicle launched at high speed on a road.

Emotional Intelligence: A New Paradigm

So-called emotional intelligence incorporates rationality and foresight into the control of emotions which, without this filter, can cause us to fall into highly damaging visceral reactions. The insult or aggression that escapes us, not to mention the unfortunate crime of passion.

Intuitive intelligence allows us to make immediate decisions when there is no time to think rationally . It is based on the accumulation of previous experiences, it is the fruit of the experience acquired. An automatic and rapid contrast with the experiences lived gives us a clear reaction of acceptance or repulsion of the situation, object or person that is offered to us. It is not infallible because our statistics of lived events are never infinite, but it should be a very serious warning to keep in mind. Often, the evaluation made later by rational intelligence makes us act wrongly against the intuitive warning. It is up to each person to better calibrate his intuition and decide when it is convenient for him to listen to it and when it is not.

Rational intelligence (also called analytical, logical, deductive or equivalent adjectives), with functioning totally opposed to intuition, requires time and calm . It has been the one that has allowed the creation of all that we call human civilization and progress, the one that has saved nature’s pitfalls, the one that has given us tools to overcome our evident biological inferiority in front of other animals. It has also been the one that has sometimes been put at the service of human wickedness, empowering to chilling extremes the capacity to exploit and even take the lives of other people, animals, wildlife, the climate, the entire planet. The one that can cause real disasters when it lacks the foresight of the future. The human species has admired this type of intelligence so much that for more than a century it has wanted to believe, wrongly, that it was the only intelligence we had, the only one worth having. The famous IQ was based on this idea.

Planning intelligence, the domain of the executive brain, is the great current slope of Psychology and, of course, of the teachings at all levels. Knowing how to coordinate all the musicians in the same symphony so that there are no discordant notes is the clear mission of conductors.

In conclusion

Applying any of the five intelligences individually is not good or bad in itself. A musician can play a fantastic “solo” or go out of tune to the point of breaking our ears. But the clear objective of every orchestra is to play magnificent orchestral pieces in perfect harmony and coordination. You have to learn to play following the conductor’s baton.

Perhaps we should say that evolution has given us an intelligence composed of five dimensions to be harmonised . In any case, the aim is to achieve an effective intelligence that combines instincts, emotions, intuition, reasoning and the ability to plan in the most appropriate way for our individual and social well-being.

Bibliographic references:

  • Goldberg, E. (2002). The executive brain: frontal lobes and civilized mind. Criticism.
  • Guilera, L. (2006). Beyond emotional intelligence: the five dimensions of the mind. Thomson Paraninfo.
  • Ledoux, J. (1999). The emotional brain. Planet.