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Intelligence Map Made From Brain Injury Data
An anonymous reader writes with this news out of the University of Illinois:
"Scientists report that they have mapped the physical architecture of intelligence in the brain. Theirs is one of the largest and most comprehensive analyses so far of the brain structures vital to general intelligence and to specific aspects of intellectual functioning, such as verbal comprehension and working memory. Their study, published in Brain: A Journal of Neurology (abstract), is unique in that it enlisted an extraordinary pool of volunteer participants: 182 Vietnam veterans with highly localized brain damage from penetrating head injuries. ... The researchers took CT scans of the participants’ brains and administered an extensive battery of cognitive tests. They pooled the CT data to produce a collective map of the cortex, which they divided into more than 3,000 three-dimensional units called voxels. By analyzing multiple patients with damage to a particular voxel or cluster of voxels and comparing their cognitive abilities with those of patients in whom the same structures were intact, the researchers were able to identify brain regions essential to specific cognitive functions, and those structures that contribute significantly to intelligence."
I believe mine is currently functioning as intended.
This is one of those fine moments when I wish scientific journals posted online weren't pay-walled. Kinda kills the dissemination of knowledge to the masses when one has to pay $32 to view a single article once, and makes it economically infeasable for an individual to read and verify the information they hear from primary sources.
A voxel is a 3D (volumetric) pixel.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
There's the map of The Brain; is anyone working on a map of Pinky?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
While this is undoubtedly an important study, their findings are going to have to be replicated somehow in a larger, more diverse set of subjects. They're looking at just 182 people and, while it's not mentioned explicitly in the article, it appears they're all men. We know from other studies that there are anatomical differences in men's brains compared to women's brains, and even between left handed and right handed men. It would be very interesting to see, for example, a FMRI study to see if the structures play the same role in all patients.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
brain mapping.
Maybe phrenology was onto something after all!
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Let's see if they can explain this guy.
Why not "something that is useful, but not for general intelligence"? Say "vision" or "hearing"?
TFA did not specify any pre-injury base-line for intelligence.
Did they all take intelligence tests before enlisting?
Seems unlikely.
Did they have any other way to check cognitive function prior to the injury so they had some sort of a useful base-line?
Is it possible that a majority of the differences, especially in general intelligence, were less related to the injuries and more related to nature/nurture?
How about compensation?
Humans are great at adapting.
Did they check their results with people who had more recent injuries?
Might be a good starting point, but it sounds like there is a lot that could affect the things they were testing for that were not isolated or otherwise accounted for.
This study seems to be making the assumption that we all put the same brain functions in precisely the same places. But each individual has different intellectual strengths, weaknesses, and talents. Although I wouldn't say they shouldn't do this study, I fail to see how it would give us more than the coarsest understanding, biased based on the individual personalities of those tested.
This coarse understanding of the brain is a step-up from the object-level understanding we have know. From there, we can refine the model in gradual steps.
It's definitely a study with flaws, but it's also a study that advances the current state of the art.
Patience, grass hopper. The neural interfaces to allow for Total Recall to become reality are still a few coarse and flawed studies away.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
That was another question that came up in the QA section of a talk by the lead researcher, Aron Barbey a couple weeks ago.
Obviously, it's doing things that just weren't measured by these particular tests. You don't waste that much blood flow and energy use on "nothing". These tests were aimed at specific types of verbal and executive reasoning.
Barbey also mentioned that the majority of the participants in the study were right handed, and they needed follow up research to deal with the questions of whether that effects the results of the study.
AFAIK, most people will lose the same function if they lose the same part of their brain. I'd wager that anyone who didn't had already lost function in that part of their brain in their childhood, and their brain compensated.
Still, it's a crap shoot, but more data is better than none. If you have a brain tumor, and the surgeon has to choose to sacrifice one part of your brain to remove the tumor, this data helps to guide that choice.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
People also have different physical strengths and weaknesses, but we still have the same muscles in the same areas. It would be reasonable to assume the brain is the same way until we have evidence that suggests otherwise.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
From the video, I understand that damage to the right frontal and temporal lobe have no effect on general intelligence. I wonder what they are used for then?
Watching Fox.
Blank until
They took just 182 people, all of similar age, all of similar education, all gone through military training, all with penetrating head wounds and trauma to their brain, and used that to "map the brain". Sounds solid.
I didn't say the study wasn't worthy or interesting.. I am just saying with 182 subjects, the strong claim presented to me - We've mapped intelligence!) in the title of this article isn't warranted.
Who submits these things. Helper undergrads who want to see the study and their name in the "thanks to" section made famous?
Someone call quality control....
Anything to promote research into three-boobed women...
"Mapping" intelligence is like herding cats. The problem is that a brain is a swarm of neurons, meaning that its function is the sum of all of its parts. Sure some brain areas are "mappable", because they connect to specific peripheral organs, but otherwise intelligence as a function is unmappable. That is why a location for memory has not been found. In effect, the more cerebral matter is surgically removed, the deeper the memory loss is.
Even the humble slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) can navigate mazes to find a food source, using the most optimal (least expenditure of energy) path. Slime moulds have been used to create maps of major metropolitan transportation systems (such as the Tokyo subway system). Likewise, Darwin's famous experiments with earthworms revealed that earthworms use what the environment affords them in order to strengthen their burrows. They accomplish this despite lacking a central nervous system and any of the "big five" sensory organs. Finally, there are parallels between the pattern dynamics of the BZ (Belousov–Zhabotinsky) reaction and the aggregation phase of the slime mould life cycle (in which a chemical signal for starvation pulls distinct amoebas into an aggregate, and each amoeba that sends the starvation signal becomes the center of a circle towards which the other amoebas move).
Examples like suggest that many complex systems, both biological and otherwise, can demonstrate intelligent behavior. The social, cultural, political, biological, and other environmental contexts afford and constrain the kind of intelligence an organism has. Brains, especially human ones, aren't particularly special in this regard.
I'm sure there is some influence on the injuries as well - a right handed soldier is going to hold his rifle a certain way, and they are going to be facing more or less the same area - meaning that they would all share a common side facing incoming fire / shrapnel etc.
Holding a rifle or such will tend to have the helmet tilted over the rifle, shielding that side of the brain a bit more than the left, which would be more exposed.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
My informed opinion: --- the researchers were presenting, primarily, a MAPPING SYSTEM ("An integrative architecture for general intelligence mapping.") There are many many areas of intelligence that were not represented within this limited group, composed of verbal deficit injuries. There's no big news here, there's just a promising system for conducting future research on intelligence.
Primarily they missed any sort of social or emotional processing, such as face recognition, emotional recognition, metaphor comprehension, the kinds of intelligence known to reside in the right hemisphere.
(My snarky private thought was, wow, a new way of ignoring areas of intelligence that don't correspond to standardized tests.)
My dad had a stroke that damaged his right frontal lobe and part of the temporal and parietal lobes 14 years ago at 40 years old. In terms of knowledge and cognition, there was little effect, however, it did affect motor control (he has left hemi-paresis) and his sense of tough (he tends to be hypersensitive to anything on his left side, usaully registering pain with any type of contact, even just brushing his arm with something soft like a feather), speech (he saw a therapist for 8 months afterward and is pretty normal now), ability to swallow (which has since recovered), his left field of vision (if he concentrates, he can see things, but he generally ignores things there in casual vision, note that there are two different pathways for vision in the brain too), short term memory and some new long term memory (though recall of old memories is still pretty good), emotions and personality. His senses of taste and smell seemed to have changed too. Lately, he's been having problems with sleep as well (though whether or not that is caused by a new malfunction in the brain or something else isn't known right now). He also tends to be less creative in thought about learning new things, preferring step by step instructions (but that's probably because the right brain is more creative while the left is more literal and analytical).
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I can't help it:
http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
When it comes to fMRI studies, I always remember the story of a dead salmon in an fMRI scanner, that was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.
Of course, it was a resounding success! And now SCIENCE knows where in the brain of a dead salmon, the mental process to evaluate human emotions occurs.
"(My snarky private thought was, wow, a new way of ignoring areas of intelligence that don't correspond to standardized tests.)"
*grin* There's a whole laundry list of things that aren't verbal in nature but are even more important.
I think they were consciously restricting it to one specific area for now (if you try to study everything at once, you often end up not studying anything well).
If you look at the web page I linked above, one of the research themes is the role of emotion in executive function. They've only been up and running at this new institute since this past fall , so they've not had much time to do any follow on work.
3000 voxels too beaucoup!
my public library has an interlibrary loan department, they can get journal articles within a week or two through the ILL system. another library will fax your local library with a copy of the article for a $1 fee or something like that.
i can tell by some of the voxels and from having seen a lot of shops in my time (playing Commanche helicopter simulator in 1993)
"I am not deceiving myself about anything"
I recently had a small stroke on the left side of my brain. The only impact I can tell is some very slight speech problems, which are almost gone just a few weeks later. It would be neat to compare my MRI to the areas mapped out by this to see if I can notice any losses. Too bad my neurologist is not interested in talking more than spending five minutes telling me to eat better and take aspirin and a statin from now on.
There is no way in hell your going to get me to do all that stuff to my brain just to get smarter. On the other hand, I'm still pretty young. If I get started now I can take it slow.
So.... are trolls actually missing functional areas, or are they just cognitively uncoordinated?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I had a stroke at 40 as well, right frontal. Smell changed, and change in sleeping habits, but no externally testable issues. Family doctors can't even tell which side the stroke was on. But I'm still 40 now, obviously the stroke was within the past year. I've not noticed any intelligence, creativity or learning issues.
Learn to love Alaska
Just because I always remember the story doesn't mean I discard all fMRI studies outright. But I still think you should be on your toes.