Нейробиолог ЖЕСТКО про С.В. Савельева и Церебральный Сортинг

Summary

The video examines Sergei Savelyev’s proposal for “cerebral sorting”: using detailed brain scans to measure brain areas or count cells, then using those measurements to predict a person’s abilities and direct them toward suitable roles or careers.

Why the Idea Might Seem Plausible

• Existing methods for selecting people for jobs or leadership roles can be subjective, so an objective measure of ability would be appealing.
• Human intellectual abilities are strongly connected to the brain.
• Brain size has some relationship with intelligence, though the speaker notes that the correlation is not especially strong.
• Neuroscience has established that some functions are associated with particular brain regions. Historical examples include damage to areas involved in speech and the mapping of movement and sensation.

These points make it reasonable to study whether brain structure relates to ability. The speaker’s objection is not to that general research question, but to Savelyev’s proposed method and the certainty with which it is presented.

Main Objections to Cerebral Sorting

1. Cell counts alone may not explain ability

   • Skills and behavior depend not only on the number or size of brain cells, but also on how cells connect, their receptor types, and how the brain is functioning.
   • Development and social experience can shape connections and abilities. The speaker uses a child raised without normal human socialization as an example: the important changes may be in brain connectivity and development, not simply cell numbers.
   • Conditions such as schizophrenia can involve changes in neural connections even when measures such as cell number or cortical thickness do not show the relevant difference.
   • Motivation and other influences also affect a person’s performance.

2. “Genius” and ability need reliable definitions

   • The speaker questions how “genius” would be defined in a way that can be consistently measured.
   • Savelyev is described as dismissing psychological tests while also proposing that brain measurements should be correlated with people’s abilities. That raises the question of how those abilities would be assessed.
   • If existing tests can already measure general intelligence reasonably well, a brain scan would need to show a meaningful improvement to justify its cost and complexity.

3. The proposed technology appears technically unrealistic

   • The suggested scan would need extremely high resolution—down to roughly a micrometre—to identify and count cells.
   • The speaker argues that current imaging cannot achieve this kind of whole-brain, non-invasive detail. In methods that use radiation, greater resolution can require greater exposure, creating health risks; a test used to make important decisions might also need to be repeated.
   • The resulting images would create enormous storage and processing demands. Reconstructing and analyzing so many slices would require capabilities beyond what the speaker says current systems can provide.
   • Some cellular details, such as receptor composition, are identified through laboratory staining methods. The speaker argues these cannot simply be read by a non-invasive tomograph.

4. Brain regions do not map neatly onto abilities

   • Cytoarchitectonic maps distinguish areas by the kinds and arrangements of cells they contain, but those areas do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with complex abilities.
   • Even structures such as the amygdala contain subregions and different kinds of neurons with multiple functions.
   • Brain plasticity can allow other areas to take over functions. The speaker cites amblyopia (“lazy eye”) and variation in the location of speech-related areas as examples.
   • Consequently, a person’s anatomy alone may not reliably reveal what they can do.

5. Validating the method would require long-term research

   • Researchers would first need to scan and assess many people, then compare those measurements with independently assessed abilities.
   • If the goal is to predict a child’s future aptitudes, researchers would need to follow participants for many years—possibly decades—to learn whether early measurements predict later outcomes.
   • The study would also need to account for repeat measurements, errors, and false predictions.
   • The speaker points to connectomics as a cautionary comparison: mapping connections is difficult even in relatively simple nervous systems, and progress has been slow.

Overall Conclusion

The speaker accepts that brain structure may provide clues about human abilities, but argues that Savelyev’s cell-counting approach overlooks connectivity, development, plasticity, and brain activity—and faces severe problems of measurement, safety, data handling, and validation. He suggests that simpler indicators or measures of brain activity might be more practical avenues to investigate, while emphasizing that the proposed tomographic system is not justified by the claims made for it.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Vladimir Alipov — the neuroscientist presenting the critique.
• Elia Weiss — the interviewer, whose prompts frame the discussion.
• Sergei Savelyev — discussed as the proponent of cerebral sorting; he is not presented as speaking in the excerpt.
• Researchers and research areas referenced: Paul Broca and the study of speech-related brain areas; Wilder Penfield and brain mapping; the Moscow Brain Institute and work associated with Zvorykin; and connectomics research.