However, one of the interesting conflicts that people have is they believe that our thought patterns are not physical, yet they completely are. They are not something spooky, they are physical mechanisms in our brains that are triggered through the very physical structures of our brains. We might not know exactly how thoughts work, but we know that different conditions will affect the brain and, those neuron structures affect the way in which we think, and feel.

I love a few things about this excerpt. Maybe I'll go way over the top in depth one day, but this is something I'm actively pursuing very heavily through research.

It is also pretty easy to see that it is physical as there are strong correlations between parent intelligence and that of the child, which means that it is nature, not nurture. But, nurture does affect our intelligence, with studies suggesting that a poor diet, especially in the formative years, has an impact on outcomes. How much impact is hard to tell perhaps, but is it the child's fault they are an idiot?

This can be complicated even more. Transgenerational epigentic change caused by the environment, can be be transmitted to future generations without altering DNA. In this case, nurture could set the limitation, and despite having the predisposition for intelligence, future generations have to live with the repercussions of the environmental pressures of previous generations. This would be true regardless of "optimization" for success in their formative years. So yeah, "hey I have intelligence genes and my parents were great, but I got screwed by temporary genetic change that started with my great grandpa." Weird.

Perhaps one day there will be such a map of the inner brain that we will understand it more like we do the outer body...

It's a start: http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/

However, while know that poor diet leads to poor outcomes in later life, parents across the globe are still raising an increasing number of children with poor diets.

Obviously there are fundamental nutrients that we need, and other things that we should avoid. The body is a chemistry lab, and garbage in = garbage out. However, I believe there's an extra emphasis that we need to take considering the enteric nervous system. Stuff is wild. A very large percentage of your microbiome is not able to be cultured in the lab. We don't have much information on how everything works.