Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Study: Intelligent people's brains wired differently to those with fewer intellectual abilities

"Scientists claim to have found a correlation between how well wired-up some individuals were to their cognitive abilities and general success in life."
“We’ve tried to see how we can relate what we see in the brain to the behavioural skills we can measure in different people. In doing this, we hope to able to understand what goes on ‘under the bonnet’ of the brain,” said Professor Stephen Smith of Oxford University, who led the study published in Nature Neuroscience.
“You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from one another. Then we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant,” Professor Smith said.
“It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits, the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of different sets of overlapping circuits,” Professor Smith said.
“We hope that by looking at brain-imaging data we’ll be able to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what these kinds of test actually require the brain to do,” he said.
It may also be possible to use the research to work out how to train people to improve their brain connectivity and therefore push than up the scale so that they achieve more than they otherwise would, he added.
“It’s a question of whether it’s possible to move people up the axis of connectivity. We know from other research that it is possible to improve cognitive performance with training, but what we don’t know yet is whether this is true of connectivity,” he explained.
These guys are distinguished scientists... you can tell.

4 comments:

rcommal said...

Here's what I would say about brains, as I so often do about so many other things: You can't guarantee success, and that's a full stop (and by full stop, I mean, for those who object to "full stop": PERIOD). You can guarantee failure (except for the exceptions--those,rare notable exceptions--who manage to beat the odds into submission and leak past those who are determined to stop the flow, yet fail themselves).

For all of my life, among other things of interest, I have found of interest viewing the world, those most loud in it, and considering categorizing those most loud into which sort of guarantors they're most liking to be.

; )

rhhardin said...

Men have a long connection to the groin that makes them good in STEM fields.

Steg said...

I'm reading a book right now, "How The Body Knows It's Mind". It is really enthralling. My dad read it in maybe four days- he was glued to it.

The book is exploring the link between our physical world interactions and the way our brains learn things. I'm only sixty pages in, but there is an emphasis on learning by doing. The same area of the brain (I think parietal lobe?) controls our fine motor functions in fingers as is responsible for our number processing. More evidence for handy people will have an easier time with numbers. (although I do wonder why so many musicians are brain dead collectivists???)

Good book if you need a quick one.

ricpic said...

There's a lotta spaghetti up there!