Intelligent people's brains wired differently to those
with fewer intellectual abilities, says stud
Scientists claim to have found a correlation between
how well wired-up some individuals were to their cognitive abilities and
general success in life
steve connor Science Editor
Monday 28 September 2015 15:33 BST
The brains of high-achieving individuals are wired up
differently to those of people with fewer intellectual or social abilities
according to one of the first studies to find a physical link between what goes
in the brain and a person’s overall lifestyle.
An analysis of the “connectivity” between different parts of
the brain in hundreds of healthy people found a correlation between how well
wired-up some individuals were to their cognitive abilities and general success
in life, scientists said.
The researchers found that “positive” abilities, such as
good vocabulary, memory, life satisfaction, income and years of education, were
linked significantly with a greater connectivity between regions of the brain
associated with higher cognition.
This was in contrast to the significantly lower brain
connectivity of people who scored high in “negative” traits such a drug abuse,
anger, rule-breaking and poor sleep quality, the scientists said
White matter fiber
architecture from the Connectome Scanner dataset.
“We’ve tried to see how we can relate what we see in the brain
to the behavioural skills we can measure in different people. In doing this, we
hope to able to understand what goes on ‘under the bonnet’ of the brain,” said
Professor Stephen Smith of Oxford University, who led the study published in
Nature Neuroscience.
The scientists were part of the $30m (£20m) Human Connectome
Project funded by the US National Institutes of Health to study the neural
pathways of the brain. Connectomes have been likened to taking real-time images
of the living circuit diagrams governing the communication of signals from one
part of the brain to another.
They compared the “connectomes” of 461 health people taken
by real-time brain scanners called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
and attempted to see if there were any significant correlations with 280
different behavioural or demographic measures, such as language vocabulary,
education and even income.
“You can think of it
as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are
functionally distinct from one another.
Each fMRI analysis looked at the connectivity – the amount
of nerve signalling – that takes place between about 200 different regions of
the brain. The one that stood out was the connectivity between the parts of the
brain involved in so-called higher-level cognition, such as language and learning,
Professor Smith said.
“You can think of it as a population-average map of 200
regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from one another. Then
we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in
every participant,” Professor Smith said.
“The quality of the imaging data is really unprecedented.
Not only is the number of subjects we get to study large, but the resolution of
the fMRI data is way ahead of previous large datasets,” he said.
The ability to measure the amount of nerve signalling
between different parts of the brain, especially those involved in high
cognition such as learning and memory, could help scientists to better
understand the nature of general intelligence, which is currently measured by
tests that examine a range of intellectual skills.
“It may be that with hundreds of different brain circuits,
the tests that are used to measure cognitive ability actually make use of
different sets of overlapping circuits,” Professor Smith said.
“We hope that by looking at brain-imaging data we’ll be able
to relate connections in the brain to the specific measures, and work out what
these kinds of test actually require the brain to do,” he said.
It may also be possible to use the research to work out how
to train people to improve their brain connectivity and therefore push than up
the scale so that they achieve more than they otherwise would, he added.
“It’s a question of whether it’s possible to move people up
the axis of connectivity. We know from other research that it is possible to
improve cognitive performance with training, but what we don’t know yet is
whether this is true of connectivity,” he explained.
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