Attention is all we have - David Bessis

David Bessis

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Attention is all we have<br>A conjectural theory of cognitive inequality

David Bessis<br>Feb 03, 2026

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Hand drawing of neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal<br>Some people are smarter than others—and some are fabulously smart. We may disagree on many things, but can we at least agree on that?<br>The origin of cognitive inequality is a hot, divisive topic. The existence of cognitive inequality is hardly controversial. We do struggle to come up with a satisfactory definition of intelligence, especially in its most creative and socially valuable forms, but most agree that people like Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla, or John von Neumann were extraordinarily intelligent.<br>This aligns well with my experience in pure math academia, where careers and even personal identities are shaped by the shared perception of a mesmerizingly wide cognitive gap between mathematicians. This is a central theme in their discussions and a source of both fear and admiration.<br>Yet for all the culture wars on the origins of cognitive inequality, there is little debate on its very nature.<br>When someone is unusually smart, what is going on in their brain? This is a different question from “where does cognitive inequality come from?”, and also from “can we really measure it?” (another controversial topic).<br>It is a basic, foundational question that stems from two widely accepted facts—that some people are smarter than others, and that intelligence is a manifestation of brain activity—and asks for the natural follow-up: what is really going on? What are the physical differences between the brain of a super smart person and the brain of a normal person?<br>The garden of bad metaphors

Despite its adjacency to some of the most contentious issues in science, this topic has remained relatively quiet. It might be because of this very proximity.<br>Or maybe the question is too simple and natural. Five-year olds love to ask brutal questions like this one, but grown-ups are usually more hesitant, as they don’t want to come across as unsophisticated.<br>Or perhaps this is because there were historical precedents where people went looking for answers and came back empty-handed. The brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss sits in a jar on a storage shelf somewhere at the University of Göttingen, and is so unremarkable that it remained mislabeled for over a century without anyone noticing. After Albert Einstein died in 1955, the pathologist removed his brain without the permission of the family, preserved it in formaldehyde, and dissected it into hundreds of slices—some researchers claimed to have observed peculiarities in the samples, but these findings are generally regarded as unconvincing.<br>If we stick to solid science, there is remarkably little we know on the subject.<br>But here’s the catch. While the simplest and most natural question remains unaddressed, people continue to rely on the same flawed brain metaphors and the same dubious biological assumptions. This only adds to the confusion around IQ and the heritability of intelligence.<br>For example, people marvel at the “speed” and “working memory” of von Neumann’s brain, as if it were a CPU with a unique clock speed and L1 cache. But from a biochemical perspective, what could this even mean?<br>Genes code for proteins, which assemble into cells, which assemble into tissues. Within-species genetic variability isn’t about new genes coding for new proteins with new functional roles that open the possibility for radically new architectures—it is about minute variations in the quantity and conformation of the same proteins, which retain the same overall structures and functional roles.<br>It is true that these minute variations compound over embryogenesis and life, resulting in sizable physical and physiological differences between individuals. Yet it is also true that all human beings are built with the same architecture and the same functional blueprint. It’s not like some people have normal hearts while others have 500 horsepower turbopumps. And it’s not like some have Snapdragon 8 smartphone processors in their brains while others have NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs.<br>To stick with this terrible CPU metaphor, it’s more like some people have a Snapdragon 7 while others have a Snapdragon 8—the performance gap is noticeable, but everybody runs the same apps.<br>There is one caveat to that. Genetic anomalies can derail brain development and hamper its normal functioning. A Snapdragon 8 with a defunct thermal management probe will not operate properly. Phenylketonuria, also known as PKU, is an example of a recessive genetic condition that, if untreated, can lead to microcephaly and severe learning disabilities.<br>By contrast, there is no accidental change to a Snapdragon 8 that magically turns it into an NVIDIA H200. This probably explains why we have never found any specific mutation that causes a drastic increase in cognitive...