Goodbye, IQ Tests: Brain Imaging Predicts Intelligence Levels 213
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Soulskill
from the but-random-internet-sites-already-tell-me-i'm-a-genius dept.
from the but-random-internet-sites-already-tell-me-i'm-a-genius dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Research from Washington University in St. Louis has identified variations in brain scans that they believe identify portions of the brain that are responsible for intelligence (abstract). As suspected (and as explained by cartoons) brain size does play a small role; they said that brain size accounts for 6.7 percent of variance in intelligence. Recent research has placed the brain's prefrontal cortex, a region just behind the forehead, as providing for 5 percent of the variation in intelligence between people. The research from Washington University targets the left prefrontal cortex, and the strength of neural connections that it has to the rest of the brain. They think these differences account for 10 percent of differences in intelligence among people. The study is the first to connect those differences to intelligence in people."
Intelligence is... (Score:2, Informative)
...what you do and accomplish, not what you are.
Hello Phrenology (Score:2, Informative)
Ha, and you thought it was just psuedo science.
I know that guy. (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure I agree with this detour into creepy eugenics territory though.
Re:The question is... (Score:5, Informative)
The question is, do the excess connections cause intelligence, or does working the brain cause the excess connections?
Twin studies give very strong evidence for the former. IQ scores for adopted children correlate much stronger with their biological parents than with their adoptive parents. But there could be a feedback effect as well: intelligent people are more likely to enjoy puzzles and engage in brain stimulating activities, which may cause the gap between them and dumb people to widen even further.
Re:The question is... (Score:5, Informative)
predictable formula stories, you IQ drops 1 point for each year you follow such a series.
8D
Re:The question is... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I believe the opposite is true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
"There are some family effects on the IQ of children, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. However, adoption studies show that by adulthood adoptive siblings aren't more similar in IQ than strangers, while adult full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Conventional twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.86), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0)."