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Goodbye, IQ Tests: Brain Imaging Predicts Intelligence Levels
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."
The question is, do the excess connections cause intelligence, or does working the brain cause the excess connections?
But what about your Wisdom?
Seems a better measure than how fast you can perform math, patern recognition, etc.
Thanks to AD&D I learned about the importance of balance Int with Wis
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...what you do and accomplish, not what you are.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
As half of the random sample tested complains that it doesn't give the the correct values, using some lame ideological argument, due to their misunderstanding of the science. while the other half seem rather smug.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Applying for a job should be easier now. Just send your MRI scan.
Unless the MRI can show the brain as a series of miniature illustrations, these guys are about 121 years late to the game. But maybe that's just my approbativeness showing...
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Ha, and you thought it was just psuedo science.
... ambition, perseverance, drive and patience ?
Seems like a pretty big gap... they're saying they've identified 3 factors that together make up (if they can be believed) about 21.7% of the "variation in intelligence". So where's the other 78.3%?
I'm not criticizing their results. Maybe they are correct. But it still isn't saying a hell of a lot.
I still prefer my method of estimating other people's IQ by correcting their spelling errors.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I've heard of Todd Braver before. He has done some interesting work on how digital devices are "rotting" our brains.
Not sure I agree with this detour into creepy eugenics territory though.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
At last, my intelligence will be measured automatically by some funny tool, without any effort from my side....
Wait a minute, this actually does not make any sense....
Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrr, sorry? What? You say my IQ is 300? Oh, ok, now, i just wonder how to open this door with my iPhone!!!
When I was 10, longer ago than most of you have been alive, my mother regaled me with a tale that Einstein's brain had 2x the number of convolutions.
This was before they figured out that had something to do with it. Whatever happened to that?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I had a friend in high school who was a straight A student, top of the class, all that. Guess what he wanted to do. He wanted to become a Car Mechanic. He should have gone to MIT and put us on mars. But he didn't want to.
Also he didn't have any street smarts and kept getting lost on short trips.
Again so what? It's what you do in the end.
Also Mycroft Holmes was smarter than Holmes as Holmes kept saying but what did Mycroft do? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycroft_Holmes
The press release doesn't cover that, nor the abstract and the rest of TFA is behind a paywall.
In case the one-liner in the subject isn't verbose enough the issue is "what is being measured". One needs some kind of gold standard. "Intelligence" is a slipperly enough of a concept that in practice it tends to be "defined by" some kind of measurement scheme. This new measurement scheme has to be calibrated by some existing one -- i.e. these measurements explain intelligence as independently assessed by some other extant measurement scheme.
Unless they get a lot better at correlating than 20%-ish then either they represent a refutation of those existing schemes (which requires some other compelling argument) or they are dramatically inferior, but some new enough approach to be "publishable". The latter is probably all the research article is about. So, don't get your hopes up on "pinning down the slippery". If you are already uncomfortable with IQ tests as assessments then you probably won't accept any calibration of the new technique and thus view it even more skeptically than the existing techniques.
"Head! Paper! Now! Move that melon of yours and get the paper if you can! Haulin' that gargantuan cranium about! I'm not kidding, that boy's head's like Sputnik! Spherical, but quite pointy in parts. Well, that was off sides, wasn't it? He'll be crying himself to sleep tonight on his huge pillow!"
I drank what? -- Socrates
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom is knowing not to put it in fruit salad.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The answer to your question is: it depends.
"Intelligence" has two separate and distinct meanings in colloquial English. It can mean the ease and speed of comprehension, or it can mean the total amount of knowledge a person has.
Working the brain will cause it to make more connections, and some of these connections translate in an abstract way to other topics. Thus, a Chemistry major might be able to pick up cooking more easily, or a farmer's son might make a better cartographer.
In some sense, the brain learns "patterns", and there are only so many patterns in the world. For example: once you get a deep understanting of exponential functions, you start to see them in the real world. Compound interest is an exponential function, for example.
Hence, gaining more connections can translate into an increase in faster understanding and comprehension of other things - they are "similar" to other things you've seen.
The other side of the question has to do with learning original patterns. This is based on fundamental processes in the brain and is all balled up with information and complexity theory, as well as motivation and perceived value.
There are at least 2 genes known to confer a general increase in intelligence, so it seems likely that the fundamental processes are more or less efficient depending on the genetic makeup.
There is also abundant evidence that the environment plays an overwhelming role in the brain's development at the current time, and in the current culture. The 2 genes mentioned are predictors of success and intelligence, but there are better predictors based on parental choices (how the child was raised) and random luck (being in the right place at the right time).
So even if you don't happen to have those 2 genes, you can become highly intelligent by working harder.
So back to your question: working the brain causes more connections, and by one mechanism these connections will be perceived as an increase in intelligence. Without exposure to information or variation in environment, there will be fewer connections.
OTOH, there is a genetic component which will cause more connections and a higher intelligence from the same data, all else being equal.
When I went to university, I thought I might find people mostly with similar opinions (politics etc) to myself, being of the same IQ group. Up until then I had always thought most people around me had plainly idiotic opinions and I had put it down to their being a bit low on brainpower. In fact I found the others at uni (who we can assume were all of significantly higher IQ than average) had the same range of idiotic opinions (IMHO) as people generally.
Surveys have shown that the distribution of political, ethical and religious opinions tends to be the same whatever the IQ group. I find this strange.
Take the infamous Mrs Thatcher. I can recognise that she was a very intelligent woman but at the same time stupid in many things. Like she thought that by privatising industries and selling the shares to the public (cheap), the British people would become shareholders in large numbers - a "shareholding democracy" - and we would all then clamour for more efficiency in those industries as shareholders. What happened is that we bought those shares and then promptly sold them again (mostly to foreign enterprises as it turned out - a large part of UK rail freight is now owned by the *nationalised* German Railways!). The point is that most people with any sense could have told her that would happen - why could someone so intelligent not see it herself? Just one example of my point.
and also when they were engaged in a series of mentally challenging tasks associated with fluid intelligence, such as indicating whether a currently displayed image was the same as one displayed three images ago.
Perhaps they are not as dead as all that.
that people can start posting Internet Brain Imaging that says they are above average now too?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
Why don't they just do a contextual IQ instead? Answer survey questions like do you drive a Kia? Do you buy scratch off lottery tickets? Do you believe the moon landing was faked? Do you own an emachines computer? I guarantee they could get accurate to within 5 points.
No. IQ tests were banned in the US because they were considered discriminatory.
Not discriminatory as in, schools or businesses are taking IQ test results and discriminating against those with lower scores. But as in, they declared that the test was racist/discriminatory in and of itself... because certain racial groups (you can probably guess which ones) consistently did poorly.
Cabbage: A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head. - Bierce
Perhaps we should be scanning the cabbage instead?
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Right... Even if the scan gives results that are comparable to traditional testing, I don't think they are going to replace the traditional tests any time soon. At least, not until the price high tech medical scans becomes competitive with the price of pencils and paper.
People have been trying to measure intelligence for well over a hundred years now, but I have yet to see anybody precisely and fully define exactly what it is they are measuring.
And don't say IQ - the only thing IQ tests measure is the ability to do IQ tests. Read up on their history. There is nothing scientific about their origin.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
I didn't notice a definition of intelligence and wonder how they define it. ("Well we know it when we see it.")
I think potential intelligence is the ability to provide high quality genes (in the adaptive sense) to the next generation. Realized intelligence then would mean one has already done so but I suspect that only a much later generation would be able to apply the classification with any accuracy.
Nate
Two reasons to be skeptical of any of the claims about BRAIN SIZE. (The abstract emphasizes other things like "global connectivity" so pelase don't read these comments as a destruction of TFA. More how Slashdot reported it.)
1. The history of intelligence testing. Read S. J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" and you'll find good reason to immediately be skeptical of any research such at this.
2. The statistical assumptions. So what's on the left hand side of the model? Obviously, some measure of intelligence. Thus the right hand side variables (size of different regions, etc.) are predicting an intelligence composite. Which assumes that intelligence is something determined in part by those right hand side variables or something correlated with those variables. These studies assume an at least semi-valid measure of intelligence. If they want to claim a causal relationship, I want a damn good measure of intelligence. Otherwise they're finding connections between something that may well be correlated with whatever we call intelligence, and we have no reason to believe brain size.
Furthermore, to say 6% of the variance is explained by brain size, we're assuming there's nothing unmeasured that doesn't also correlated with brain size and the dependent variable (intelligence). Historically, this situation has often presented itself. For example, when the better nourished happened to be more intelligent AND have bigger brains because of their nourishment.
A final problem with ALL intelligence research that wants to claim a causal relationship is that intelligence isn't something we can really manipulate in the lab, so we're always going to have to worry about endogeneity and selection issues. we can't control "how people get assigned to intelligence," and so we always may have something unmeasured which really explains what we find (by way of correlating with, for example, "global connectivity.")
I had one when I was in high school, but that was in the 1980's. They never did tell us the results.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
Seriously, when I'm worn out, I'm dumb as a fencepost.
I generally don't drink caffeine, which means that sometimes when I'm tired, a full cup will have me buzzing like a squirrel on crack. Caffeine+sugar means a marked improvement in thinking ability (followed by a sharp drop later on).
Correlation of headline and story strongly inversely correlates with the headine writer's intelligence.
In other words, "Goodbye traditional IQ tests, hello IQ tests based on headline-writing."
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Maybe you need better HR. Or bypass HR altogether with your recruitment. Your HR is probably selecting people who play buzzword bingo on their resumes and claim 5 years of experience with Windows 7, because those applicants look the most impressive to the tech-uninformed HR staff even though the reality is that they are among the worst.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Correlation does not equal causation. Especially with fMRI...we just know they see **something** we don't know what it is or if it represents all that the brain does. This work represents the worst in trends in data interpretation.
Having a part of the brain light up on an fMRI does not mean anything more than there are (as others have said on this thread) more *connections* being accessed. This has **nothing** to do with any idea of intelligence as we think of it.
Connections between information are only one part of what we call intelligence or capability.
First, the information has to exist. Second the proper information must be remembered. Third, it must be applied to the current task or decision.
**Let me be clear** even if you can quantify all parts of thought for an event (which we can't at all) the fMRI data would still be only corrolary...it would absolutely not allow for any inference of causation!
Thank you Dave Raggett
people used to think that differences in skull shape reflect criminal intentions. Now they are going to base the same false assumptions on complicated X-ray visualizations ? In Babel sheep liver was sufficent, chicken testines in Rome...
So, have a bigger brain and prefrontal lobe and more connections and you are 25% intelligent... nice !!!