Antoaneta Sawyer, Ph.D.
A new article, that unraveled the “mysteries of intelligence”, appeared in this week issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Sanberg, Young, & Glascher, 2010).
The study aimed to pinpoint areas that are responsible for the human general intelligence, while inferred results that were based on the absence of a brain tissue. It's not a particular part of the brain (frontal or parietal), nor is it the strength or the speed of the above neuronal connections, or other features as total brain volume, that make us all smart or intelligent.
"General intelligence relies on the connection between the frontal and the parietal parts of the brain. It actually relies on a specific network inside the brain, and this is the connections between the gray matter, or cell bodies, and the white matter, or connecting fibers between neurons," concluded Jan Glascher, (the leading author of this paper and a postdoctoral fellow, at the department of humanities and social sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; Feb. 22-26, 2010, Proceedings of the National Academies of Science)
The topic of general intelligence has always been deeply controversial. The authors of this study diagrammed 241 patients who had some sort of brain lesions and had them take IQ tests after diagramming the location of their lesions. "We took patients who had damaged parts of their brain, tested them on intelligence IQ to see where they were good and where they were bad, and then we correlated those scores across all the patients with the location of their brain lesions. That way, you can highlight the areas that are associated with reduced performance on these tests which, by the reverse inference, means these areas are really important for general intelligence."
The map that they came up with was what they expected and involved areas of the cortex as the parietal and frontal cortex. As they finally confirmed, "In the past, people have associated general intelligence very strongly with enhanced working memory capacity, so there's a close theoretical connection with that."
Finally, the researchers concluded that both (the frontal and parietal lob) are still responsible for good language skills and good mathematics. In an earlier study, the same team of investigators found that this brain network was also important for working memory, "the ability to hold a certain number of items in your mind," as authors concluded
Reference:
Sanberg, P., Young, K., and Glascher, J. (Feb. 22-26, 2010) Proceedings of the National Academies of Science)
The topic of general intelligence has always been deeply controversial. The authors of this study diagrammed 241 patients who had some sort of brain lesions and had them take IQ tests after diagramming the location of their lesions. "We took patients who had damaged parts of their brain, tested them on intelligence IQ to see where they were good and where they were bad, and then we correlated those scores across all the patients with the location of their brain lesions. That way, you can highlight the areas that are associated with reduced performance on these tests which, by the reverse inference, means these areas are really important for general intelligence."
The map that they came up with was what they expected and involved areas of the cortex as the parietal and frontal cortex. As they finally confirmed, "In the past, people have associated general intelligence very strongly with enhanced working memory capacity, so there's a close theoretical connection with that."
Finally, the researchers concluded that both (the frontal and parietal lob) are still responsible for good language skills and good mathematics. In an earlier study, the same team of investigators found that this brain network was also important for working memory, "the ability to hold a certain number of items in your mind," as authors concluded
Reference:
Sanberg, P., Young, K., and Glascher, J. (Feb. 22-26, 2010) Proceedings of the National Academies of Science)
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