Brain and Intelligence: A Quantitative study of the frontal lobes

Although this book is difficult to read and even more difficult to review, it represents a remarkable amount of work in a difficult field, yet it may be that the semantic difficulties imposed added to a tendency toward obscure writing will greatly restrict the influence of the book. Mr. Halstead has gathered together a battery of tests, most of which he devised himself, which appear to be neuro-logically and psychologically significant. By means of these tests he has been able to measure an impairment which is not referable to any sensory or motor defect and which is not correlated directly with psychometric intelligence as determined by the usual IQ test. More significantly, it appears that by means of these tests he can differentiate organic lesions involving different parts of the brain. His impairment index is apparently most affected by injury to or operative interference with the frontal lobes. But there appears to be no correlation between the impairment index and the amount of brain substance damaged or between unilateral and bilateral lesions, and what is strangest of all, frontal lobotomy does not appear to disturb the functions reflected by the impairment index! These tests were devised, tested on control subjects, found to have distinctive correlations, and then applied to interpretation of certain Freudian concepts. That Halstead was able to obtain useful information on the function of the frontal lobes by these means appears to be an accident of circumstance rather than a result of genius-or perhaps circumstance is a major part of genius. Brain and Intelligence represents the result of twelve years' labor and includes data on 237 subjects quantitatively examined by a standard battery of twenty-seven tests. Tests on each individual were conducted on two successive days at Billings Hospital in Chicago "under good test conditions." (The author speaks of certain levels of consciousness as necessary to the performance of the tests and indicates also that there must be cooperation, and considerable motor and sensory skill, but nowhere in the book appears the word motivation and it was not even explained how proper and adequate motivation was sought in the test situation.) The 27 tests, after application to 30 heterogeneous control subjects, were found to have 78 inter-correlations which were divided by Holzinger and Thurstone, into four categories. These four categories were named C (central integration factor), A (abstraction factor), P (power ? factor), and D (direction factor). The …