Genetic Ascension novel Chapter 466

Chapter 466: Linguistics

"General Song is-."

Morgan began to speak, planning on listing out everything he knew about General Song's abilities and skills; however, the Basilisk King quickly shook his head.

The Professor was taken aback, first because he was surprised that this wasn't the information Sylas wanted, and second because this beast had picked up on the fact that it wasn't what its master needed so quickly as well.

This was the smartest creature he had ever come across, and for a moment, the scholarly side of Morgan almost geeked out. What he did best was study peculiar minds, and a mind like the Basilisk King had him on edge.

However, he quickly realized the situation they were in and that there wasn't much time. If he was correct, Kael would certainly report this, and though it was easy enough to bullshit a rookie without much experience, he knew enough about General Song to know the stoic man didn't have the mind of the meathead one might expect from him.

'If not that, then...' Morgan's pupils sharpened. '... Could he see through that already? But how could he possibly take advantage of that?'

Sylas was correct; Morgan's role here wasn't simple.

The truth was that his role as a studier of neurodivergence in humans was almost a side project, though it would still be inaccurate to describe it as such.

He was a psychologist, psychiatrist, and, oddly enough, a linguistics expert. His real specialty was in studying the changes of the human mind over the course of history, with a focus specifically on the extremes of the spectrum.

In the infancy of his career, he was focused on things like depression and why there seemed to be an uptick in it despite the fact that by objective metrics, quality of life was increasing. But that led him down an interesting rabbit hole.

For his second PhD, he actually posited that the uptick in depression was due to the overall increase in human IQ. The greater the self-awareness and self-introspection, the ironically more susceptible to such things people became. He remembered that he had given it a particularly click-baity title as well, annoyed by the backlash he had been getting.

"Humans Were Better Off Dumb," he called it.

Well, it was safe to say that he wasn't very popular for those ideas, and his studies, though having some foundation, remained quite fringe. However, the idea still stuck with him, and he burrowed further into the rabbit hole until he stumbled onto neurodivergence.

What was interesting was that he found that while IQ was increasing overall, so too were cases of neurodivergence-though, to be sure, such cases in the past were hard to document. People were more likely to burn such people at the stake than actually study them. But that was why they were so lucky that the Sixth Summoning existed, making it much easier to track. The reason this was so fascinating to Morgan was because IQ could be changed and even gamed in a way. You could quite easily train someone to boost their IQ score a few percentage points. Though you couldn't put them in an entirely new bracket, it was easy enough to say that the general increase in IQ was due to better education around the world overall.