This finally provides us with a working road map for understanding
generally how our brain may work. In the process a number of
empirical observations are clarified. This must also include the
curious observation that folks with strong math ability tend to be
disproportionately left handed. With this it is no longer
surprising. Now we need to do plenty of comparables and discover
what really happens in the brains of artists and other types of
extreme training.
The fundamental take home though is that education is wonderful but
brain training is the whole purpose of the exercise. It is within
the scope of our education system to become goal driven on those
terms and the sooner the better. It is long time that the monkeys
stopped running the zoo there.
Here is an ugly thought. Why not make it mandatory that your ability
to progress a grade rank in high school is determined by your rank in
chess? It is pretty hard to game that test of mental agility. One
could still advance in terms of actual material studied, but ranked
higher or lower on this basis. Imagine Grade 10 ranked A through E
as a system. Thus a student relying on memory would clearly be
ranked differently that a student slacking but also sharp.
This would be an easy system to establish and would provide educators
with way more information than is provided today which merely
measures how someone did on a test on a certain day.
Brain imaging can
predict how intelligent you are, study finds
August 1, 2012 By
Gerry Everding
in Neuroscience
New research suggests
as much as 10 percent of individual variances in human intelligence
can be predicted based on the strength of neural connections between
the left prefrontal cortex and other regions of the brain.
As science has long
suspected, overall brain size matters somewhat, accounting for
about 6.7 percent of individual variation in intelligence. More
recent research has pinpointed the brain’s prefrontal cortex, a
region just behind the forehead, as a critical hub for high-level
mental processing, with activity levels there predicting another 5
percent of variation in individual intelligence.
Now, new research from
Washington University in St. Louis suggests that another 10
percent of individual differences in intelligence can be explained by
the strength of neural pathways connecting the left prefrontal cortex
to the rest of the brain.
Published in the
Journal of Neuroscience, the findings establish “global brain
connectivity” as a new approach for understanding human
intelligence. “Our research shows that connectivity with a
particular part of the prefrontal cortex can predict how intelligent
someone is,” suggests lead author Michael W. Cole, PhD, a
postdoctoral research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at Washington
University.
The study is the first
to provide compelling evidence that neural connections between the
left prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain make a unique and
powerful contribution to the cognitive processing underlying
human intelligence, says Cole, whose research focuses on discovering
the cognitive and neural mechanisms that make human behavior uniquely
flexible and intelligent. “This study suggests that part of what it
means to be intelligent is having a prefrontal cortex that does its
job well; and part of what that means is that it can effectively
communicate with the rest of the brain,” says study co-author
Todd Braver, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and
of neuroscience and radiology in the School of Medicine. Braver is a
co-director of the Cognitive Control and Psychopathology Lab at
Washington University, in which the research was conducted.
One possible
explanation of the findings, the research team suggests, is that the
prefrontal region is a “flexible hub” that uses its extensive
brain-wide connectivity to monitor and influence other brain regions
in a goal-directed manner. “There is evidence that the left
prefrontal cortex is the brain region that ‘remembers’
(maintains) the goals and instructions that help you keep doing what
is needed when you’re working on a task,” Cole says. “So it
makes sense that having this region communicating effectively with
other regions (the ‘perceivers’ and ‘doers’ of the brain)
would help you to accomplish tasks intelligently.”
While other regions of
the brain make their own special contribution to cognitive
processing, it is the left prefrontal cortex that helps coordinate
these processes and maintain focus on the task at hand, in much the
same way that the conductor of a symphony monitors and tweaks the
real-time performance of an orchestra. “We’re suggesting that the
left prefrontal cortex functions like a feedback control system that
is used often in engineering, that it helps implement cognitive
control (which supports fluid intelligence), and that it doesn’t do
this alone,” Cole says.
The findings are based
on an analysis of functional magnetic resonance brain images captured
as study participants rested passively 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.
Previous findings
relating left prefrontal cortex activity to challenging task
performance were supported. Connectivity was then assessed while
participants rested, and their performance on additional tests of
fluid intelligence and cognitive control collected outside the brain
scanner was associated with the estimated connectivity. Results
indicate that levels of global brain connectivity with a part of left
lateral prefrontal cortex serve as a strong predictor of both fluid
intelligence and cognitive control abilities.
Although much remains
to be learned about how these neural connections contribute to fluid
intelligence, new models of brain function suggested by this research
could have important implications for the future understanding —
and perhaps augmentation — of human intelligence. The findings also
may offer new avenues for understanding how breakdowns in global
brain connectivity contribute to the profound cognitive control
deficits seen in schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, Cole
suggests.
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